activism

Birth of an Activist: How A Historian of 30 Years “Woke” Up

If anyone had told me thirty years ago, when I was earning my master’s degree in history from California State University, Fresno, that someday, I would be starting an online petition to try and save the newly erected statue of Gandhi in the Fresno State Peace Garden, I would have thought they were crazy would […]

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No Longer Academic: When Activism Is on the Curriculum

Howard Zinn, the late self-described “socialist anarchist” history professor and mentor to the New Left, would have been proud of the way the Wisconsin protests rolled along.  The weeks-long sit-in of the Wisconsin state capitol building–heavily populated by teachers and students–exemplified the kind of “participatory democracy” his associate Tom Hayden promoted in the Port Huron […]

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NYU’s ”Union” Activism Re-Emerges

The New York Times recently brought news that that the union and faculty activists determined to establish a graduate student union at NYU have renewed their crusade. I use the phrase “union and faculty activists” deliberately, since it’s hard to imagine that any of the graduate students actually involved in the original controversy remain at […]

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The Problem With Student Engagement

“Student engagement” is a movement and a cause that has made steady progress on our campuses. According to Inside Higher Education, it has reached a “critical mass” of participants, though many in the world of colleges and universities are only half-aware, or perhaps unaware, of what the movement is all about. The National Survey of […]

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