Thoughtful review of The Radical Fund in @dissentmag.bsky.social by @cdunning.bsky.social. (Will hand-wringing keep the left from doing what’s required to build power while in exile?) dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...
On the one hand, this is great. But I feel about this like I do about heartwarming "go fund me" campaigns. It's great that people are stepping up, but public goods should be supported with public funds.
This is why relying on charity to fund essential services is a truly wild policy choice.
"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.
All universities right now need to be making this case to the public why universities and our scientific research matters. But let’s promote our humanities and social sciences too!
“Harvard now faces one of the most consequential choices in its history: Submit to extortion and make itself complicit in the most profound assault on academic freedom and constitutional governance of our time—or go to court. The stakes are high, but the choice should not be difficult.” (Fixed link)
Garrison chaired the
Perhaps the cowardly partners today would do well to remember the legacy of one of their founders.
Their decision is an abdication of all that Garrison stood for and a legal career that made him "partner emeritus" of a firm no longer worthy of his name.
On his 80th birthday, partners at Paul, Weiss wrote a poem for "the last of the names on our door" that included the stanza:
"He attacked from the left for all those bereft/
of their rights just because of their hue/
and fought for relief as the Urban League chief/
and head of the ACLU"
Garrison chaired the National Labor Relations Board and National War Labor Board.
In the 1950s, he advised Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, and Robert Oppenheimer against accusations of communism.
He encouraged the Field and Taconic foundations to fund civil rights in the early 1960s.
Seems that Paul, Weiss has forgotten the legacy of one of its named partners: Lloyd Garrison (1897-1991) as in Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.
Great-grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and staunch defender of free speech, civil rights, and labor unions.
Brownstone buildings at Teachers College looking west toward Riverside Church. Creative Commons photo by Bohao Zhao
#edusky colleagues, higher ed or K-12, please share. We are at Columbia, but we know that this struggle matters for education across the lifespan.
A Statement from Teachers College Faculty on the Attack on American Education
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
