This is from the Maps of War site, developed (somewhat mysteriously) by ” a Flash-Designer hobbyist and professional history- buff,” who hopes to help us “place today’s war headlines into a greater historical context.”
Not every map is as elaborate (or successful) as her/his “Imperial History” of the Middle East, but the Maps are a great idea and worth a visit now and again. (It did make me feel dumb, too. Who were the Sassanid or the Seljuk?)
Education, we are told, is about opportunity. It is about young people gaining the skills needed to get ahead in the new post-industrial economy. Whether Republican or Democrat, our political leaders tell us that schools are the way into a brighter future. But what if that future is determined, in fact, by how jobs get constructed and distributed in the new global economy. And if that means that more and more good jobs are fleeing the older industrial countries, then schools in those countries are not about opportunity but instead function as gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of rewards.
from College and social class: the broken promise of America
Cross Currents, Spring, 2006 by John Raines, Charles Brian McAdams
This is from a piece Raines and McAdams wrote last year; it’s a well-researched, passionate plea for change, although in all honesty they seem a little lost about what should be done. I do like their ideas about need-based funding and access, given the ongoing attacks on affirmative action and the apparent failures of ‘percent programs’ to diversify admissions either by class or race. And I certainly agree that we need to learn to ‘see’ class and to teach it in the classroom.
On the other hand, the writers never mention the class hierarchies and privileges built into their own (university) system, including the labor exploitation that underwrites the prominence of research institutions, in everything from low-paid staff to over use of adjuncts to over-paid administrators. Ironically, (tenured) professors themselves are becoming the “gate-keepers to a shrinking pool of [educational] rewards” in their own departments.
Most academics have this ‘outward gaze’ that seems to implicitly accept that what goes on where they work is less noteworthy than what goes on in other workplaces. The result is a focus on teaching about class rather than an attempt to directly challenge the class relationships they encounter and embody. It’s one thing to write papers that document inequity; it’s quite another to organize a card drive to create a faculty union.
I think its time the professors begin to clean up their own houses. In many senses, they are the ones who made the promise so famously broken. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey, for example, found that “112 presidents of traditional four-year public and private institutions, and systems, had compensation packages totaling at least $500,000,” an increase “in that level of compensation” of “53 percent.” Amazingly, even as funding for universities is shrinking, compensation for administrators is rising.
I continue to be astonished at the way academics who write about class seem to act or think as if they themselves are not participants in a system (or subsystem) of merit and class privileges that can and should be dismantled. This energy for reform needs to be turned inward, as it were, towards fully democratizing the University itself. Once the professors are organized (hopefully working with university staff and graduate students) then there might be a fighting chance at challenging the larger inequities Raines and McAdams lament.
Many women, myself included, have been affected by cervical cancer or Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at some point in their lives. In this series of four articles, I will examine HPV and Gardasil — the facts, the hype, and what Merck stands to gain; the marketing campaigns promoting Gardasil in the U.S. and the media’s lack of attention to concerns about the rush to mandate vaccination; the role of the non-profit group Women In Government in promoting mandatory vaccination against HPV; and what is going on outside of the U.S. on this issue.
Setting the Stage: Part One in a Series on the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer
Judith Siers-Poisson
This piece is worth reading because it is one of those often too rare moments of insightful self-criticism from a progressive point of view. I for one will admit to being completely caught up in the idea of a vaccine against cancer.
I thought the commercials were silly, too, mostly because it was hard to believe that no one had heard this ongoing story about a virus that can cause cancer. Why not put this vaccine on the list of childhood vaccines?
As Siers-Poisson shows in great detail there are lots of good reasons to re-think the vaccine. It doesn’t prevent many cancers at all, as it turns out. Most importantly, the hype behind the drug turn out to be one of those classic behind the scenes arrangements designed to ensure profits.
Merck has only about a year before competing vaccines appear, cutting its profits. “Merck’s greed, ” Siers-Poisson, concludes in the third of a four part series, “and the willingness of its partners to go along with an industry driven campaign, have compromised the actual promise of the vaccine.”
