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. {…}
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Romney, Obama, and the Myth of Single Parenthood· October 25, 2012 ·
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The Presidential Obsession· October 24, 2012 ·
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The College Issue and a Discussion on Student Debt· October 23, 2012 ·
