Category: issues

“The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine and will also appear in several leading international publications, surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far. And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories … for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of ‘relevance.'” – The New York Times

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. … The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” – Harper’s

“MacDowell Board Chair Nell Painter … acknowledged that the word ‘colony’ can mean a country or given location under the control of an outside power or, as would apply to MacDowell, a community of like-minded people. But she said both definitions carry a sense of exclusion and hierarchy, and that … ‘in the language we speak today, colony is a word tied to occupation and oppression.'” – AP

Elizabeth Alexander of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “We were going to do it anyway, [but in] this moment … it seems very clear … that we all need to be thinking very sharply about how the work that we do contributes to a more just society.” But that doesn’t mean Mellon will stop funding the arts: “The way that we’re interpreting social justice is very broad. It’s very important to Mellon in all of our grant-making to say, ‘Who haven’t we reached? Who haven’t we supported?” – Artnet

“School” as we knew it is over — but that doesn’t mean learning has to be. Learning is a universal activity across human societies; school as we knew it is a recent, unusual, self-contradictory institution. As educators and as citizens, we need to understand the various purposes school was supposed to serve, and the limitations to its success. Only then can we re-imagine education for, and beyond, this public health emergency. – Medium

“Right now most insurers, if not all, have come out with a virus or communicable disease exclusion that they’re putting on their policies.” – Reuters

Boris Johnson said arts and culture were the soul of the nation. “They make our country great and are the lynchpin of our world-beating and fast-growing creative industries,” the prime minister said. – The Guardian

After months of waffling – and infuriating the arts sectors in the UK – the Tory government finally came through. One playwright: “If this package is as ambitious as it looks, then conversations within our sector will now need to turn to what our recovery might look like in terms of protecting any gains made in recent years over inclusion, representation and diversity, and how this support can reach who need it most, particularly outside of London.” – The Guardian (UK)

It has become a truism to say the coronavirus pandemic will change everything about higher education. But few discuss who should shape this change. The faculty? The student body? The public? Or the business-executive trustees that Thorstein Veblen believed were destroying the essential nature of academe? – Chronicle of Higher Education

Today, the convergence of Covid-19 closing down all public events, along with the explosive outrage with continued police carnage in communities of color, brings us to a similar inflection point as the late 1960s. Once again a fundamental shift wherein art is stripped of any pretense is emerging. As well, the enormous chasm between aesthetics and inequity must be addressed as systemic racism is dismantled. – VTDigger