Useful reading for college administrators and others involved in navigating thorny challenges facing colleges today.
A guide to the issues surrounding free speech and censorship on college campuses as well as strategies for faculty and students to deal with them constructively.
“This book considers the struggles over the boundaries of speech in order to make the case for the active role that institutions of higher education can take in bridging political divides and helping reverse the process of democratic decline.” So writes Ben-Porath—a professor of education, philosophy, and political science at the University of Pennsylvania—at the beginning of a text in which the author examines “growing polarization in American society” specifically through the lens of post-secondary institutions, which she calls “laboratories in which democracy is learned, practiced, and enhanced.” Building on some of the topics she addressed in two previous books, Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice Is Really About (co-authored with Michael C. Johanek) and Free Speech on Campus, Ben-Porath begins by tracing the roots of America’s current political polarization back to a response to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when cultural and academic institutions were being reexamined for bias, prejudice, and other social ills. The author then investigates the often complex web of so-called experts, political leanings, and unique social environments that characterize the college experience. Although Ben-Porath mostly focuses on the big picture, her chapter on strategies for K-12 institutions makes clear, accessible arguments for educating students with “media literacy” and “open discussion of hard topics.” Clearly aimed at scholars and policymakers—the dry prose may lead some readers to skip certain sections—the book ends with solid advice for students, staff, and university boards to help deal with a host of issues, including contentious public speakers and hate speech.
Useful reading for college administrators and others involved in navigating thorny challenges facing colleges today.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780226823805
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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