Universities tend to have a pretty benign if elitist image. That’s particularly true for the 2/3′s or so of the U.S. who don’t have college degrees. Too often people with degrees are grossly sentimental; perfect fodder for football programs and alumni fund drives. If you work at a university, especially if you are a teacher or graduate student, your attitude can shift dramatically.

The current GEO strike is a case in point. The Graduate Employee Organization’s (GEO) decision to strike might seem frivolous or even reckless to anyone unfamiliar with the way they have historically been treated by the University of Illinois. But sometimes paranoia is justified. The UI stalled the graduate student union in court for more than…

Two recent posts– one on the Progressive Historian blog and one on Iterating Towards Openness– reminded me of Gramsci. (It’s interesting to do a search on the phrase, “The Long March Through the Institutions.” It seems to have become a key phrase in right wing Christianity’s paranoid fantasies.) What’s so striking is the lack of a discussion of democracy in either the historian’s blog or the open source advocate’s post.

In all fairness both posts are brief summaries of conferences, not fully developed critiques, so I don’t want to stretch my point too far. But it’s interesting that discussions of technology (as the writer on the Progressive Historian suggests) are so rarely focused on progressive goals….