Sunday Reading

by zunguzungu

Fotoshop by Adobé:

Vinay Lal, “The West is No Longer the Motor of History”:

Some lost correspondance between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson:

My Dear Thomas,

Greetings from Massachusetts! Weather here is pleasant enough, and the family is in excellent health. It is still most tremendous to think of the tireless work we committed to the building of this great nation. What young men we were, and what lofty dreams did we capture. On a separate note, I have enclosed several random Renderings. Many are of dogs. Some are of infant newborns. Yet more are of these very infants dressed to resemble dogs in costume. And still others depict small children dressed in dogs’ apparel.

I have the Honor to be &c

J. Adams

Amoun Sleem is one of the Domary, the Gypsy community of Jerusalem. As director of a local community center, she fights to help the women in her community to obtain education and economic independence:

Corporate Campuses:

The climate of mutual suspicion that the corporate contours of the university has produced reminds me of the late Erving Goffman’s notion of the total institution. In total institutions, human needs are under strict control — the university’s rules, regulations and administrative practices, which tend to be bureaucratic and impersonal. In total institutions individual autonomy is restricted and creativity can be seen as out of institutional bounds. In total institutions power is exercised hierarchically; it is not shared. On our corporate campuses frustrated professors have been beaten down. Most of us are grunts in a system with fewer and fewer intellectual payoffs. In the gloom our students, who deserve to be better educated, move from class to class hoping to earn enough credits to graduate with a bachelors degree in four, five, or perhaps six years. Have our university institutions prepared them to be informed citizens who will contribute positively to society?

On Academic publishing as a suicide bombing mission against the academy:

This system can’t last forever (though its pernicious effects might). The big four will eventually see revenues drop as they squeeze the last drops of blood out of the world’s universities. But even as they undermine their own business model, they will destroy the power of universities to generate knowledge for the betterment of society. (Yes, I’m old-fashioned that way.) Meanwhile, universities, governments, corporations, and ordinary citizens will turn to other sources of information – which they can get for free, or at least affordably – undermining the relevance of public scholarship.For-profit academic publishing is a suicide bombing mission against the academy. In pursuing their doomed business model, the big publishers risk turning the work we do as scholars into a giant echo chamber. Students take on a lifetime of debt, partly to pay for journal subscriptions that enrich a few corporations. Scholars are turned into serfs who must feed the beast new product for it to sell, or risk losing their already tenuous livelihoods. Institutions bankrupt themselves paying for ever more expensive journals without which they cannot compete. Fewer and fewer people can read the rapidly increasing number of scholarly articles.

Bit Brigade plays Mega Man:

Emails between OPD and Oakland officials:

In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.

When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week ofOctober, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers. “Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.” Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.

In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan. Her office told KTVU she prefers face-to-face communication.

The $441,728 college diploma: