Grad Students to the Barricades
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
Winter 2025
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The Corporatization of Higher Education
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.
Remembering Murray Hausknecht, 1925-2012
His commentary was sharp, as much of Dissent is, but I always imagined him writing with a smile on his face, while many of our other writers write with grim determination.
Social Policy and Poverty: Don’t Fear Europe!
My own education in American social policy began intensively in 1980. That year, three events cemented my interest in American poverty and the U.S. public response to it.
A New Era for Wal-Mart Workers?
There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
Universities and the Urban Growth Machine
Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades?
Certain Problems Need Socialist Solutions
We have reached the point where the satisfaction of material human needs no longer requires that every adult on the planet work a forty-hour week. The jobs are not coming back.
Who Gets to Define Immigrants as “Illegal”?
News organizations must be held accountable for the impact their use of “illegal” has not only on individual readers, but also on communities and on any chance of future congressional action.
Eric Hobsbawm and the Limits of Marxism
While Hobsbawm will be remembered as a historian of singular gifts, his writings already seem less a harbinger of the shape of things to come than sterling examples of an older kind of scholarship at its best.
Eugene Genovese and Dissent
Eugene D. Genovese, one of the foremost left-wing scholars of his time, has died. A teenage member of the Communist Party kicked out for “having zigged when I was supposed to zag,” he gained national notoriety in 1965 for welcoming “the impending Viet Cong victory” at a Rutgers teach-in.
From One Gilded Age to Another: The GOP’s Playbook Looks a Lot Like Grover Cleveland’s
By echoing a creed that failed the nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the conservatives who rule the GOP make it almost impossible to have a serious debate about how to solve our problems in the early twenty-first.
“Empowerment” Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers’ Unions
“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s edu-drama, Won’t Back Down. “They’re nothing compared to me.” …
The Politics of Provocation
An earlier version of this ran at openDemocracy last week, before tens of thousands marched in Benghazi to demand the dissolution of Islamist militias—a demand soon supported by the Libyan government. The plot line could have leapt from the baroque …
Across the River from Wall Street, Democracy Gets a Little Bit More Participatory
Author’s note (added 9/25): Over the past few years, I have been an intermittent participant in local Brooklyn politics through New Kings Democrats and Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform, political organizations that hope to change the character of Brooklyn politics …
