But the attacks would not stop. Anonymous trolls on Twitter said people should boycott Levi’s until I’d been fired. So did some of my old gymnastics fans. A dossier of my tweets and all of my online interactions were sent to the CEO by the head of corporate communications. Continue reading Yesterday I was Levi’s brand president. I quit so I could be free
by Jeff Noonan
The person who loves to think is critically minded. That person is not an undisciplined skeptic, but one who can detect contradictions between principle and practice, and between principles and the values to which they purportedly lead as means. Continue reading Taking notes 58: For the love of thinking: eleven theses
by Angelo J. Letizia This essay tries to illustrate how the question of God’s existence can be approached quasi-scientifically or quasi-empirically. This however is not a dogmatic conception of God, rooted in ritual and passivity. Rather, this essay argues for … Continue reading God as justice, not dogma
by Henry A. Giroux The Nobel Prize-winning author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has insisted rightfully that “Children are the future of any society,” adding, “If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children.”[1] If one … Continue reading Taking notes 50: Schools as punishing factories: the handcuffing of public education
by Thorstein Veblen In the working theory of the modern civilized community, — that is to say in the current common-sense apprehension of what is right and good, as it works out in the long run, — the university is … Continue reading “The Governing boards”: a memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men
by Henry A. Giroux We now live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished.[1] The consequences … Continue reading Higher education and the politics of disruption
by Henry A. Giroux Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. . . . Open thinking points beyond itself. — Theodor Adorno … Continue reading Thinking dangerously in an age of political betrayal
by Danny Weil [Note: This piece concludes the two-part essay. For Part 1, please see: Link] Ted Forstmann and private advocacy philanthropy as a social movement When there is an obvious financial pay-off for those promoting public policy changes through ‘advocacy philanthropy’, it behooves citizens to critically examine those advocates, their agendas and the implications of their claims. Sadly, this is not the case in America today nor was it at the time the leverage buy-out of public schools was being driven by those who posed as charitable individuals but whose real agenda was and is the incessant accumulation of … Continue reading Advocacy philanthropy and the leveraged buy-out of public schools — Part 2
by Danny Weil In a newly released book entitled The Gates Foundation and the Future of US Public Schools, author Kenneth Saltman argues that the entry into educational reform policies within the last decade by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other, what he calls “venture philanthropists”, is part of a broader ideological and economic trend. More specifically, Saltman argues that this development is one connected to neo-liberalism and the shift from a capitalist industrial economy to a service oriented economy. Saltman continues by correctly identifying that this modification represents a shift from the public governance of education to … Continue reading Advocacy philanthropy and the leveraged buy-out of public schools — Part 1
by Henry A. Giroux Public education is under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological and political fundamentalists. The most serious attack is being waged by advocates of neoliberalism, whose reform efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, traditional texts and memorization drills. At the heart of this approach is an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools, and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow education to be organized and administered by market-driven forces.[1] Schools would “become simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps,” valuable for … Continue reading Surviving neoliberalism
Philosophers for Change 