Protesting the GOP tax bill: yet another attack on public higher education

Today I and my classmates at the Grad Center are joining forces with students from NYU and Columbia in a Walkout to protest the Republican text bill, which will tax tuition waivers and reduce our already small incomes as graduate assistants and teaching fellows. (For those of you who don't know, adjunct professors like myself …

A case against charter schools: send back your saviors

As a professor, I work with public school teachers who are in the process of becoming certified to teach in the New York City Department of Education in a program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. These new teachers support students from all over the world, many of whom are immigrants or children of …

The struggle to define who is worthy: mass incarceration and mass deportation

I just finished watching an interview with Susan Burton, author of "Becoming Ms. Burton" and founder of A New Way of Life, a re-entry program for women of color who are adjusting to their new lives after prison, and Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow," on Democracy Now!. Alexander wrote the introduction to Burton's book, in …

The eye in the sky and “low-status” domestic workers

Not long ago, I watched a PBS Frontline video called "Rape on the Night Shift," an expose delving into the abuse of and violence, often by their own supervisors, against female immigrants who work as janitors for poor wages in buildings that I would wager the majority of Americans have frequented for one reason or another. One …

The performance of suffering for the rich white audience

A friend of mine posted a video on Facebook today featuring Anuradha Koirala, a Nepalese activist fighting sex trafficking in her country and in neighboring India, being honored at the CNN Heroes Award ceremony in 2010. The courage with which she fights for the rights of girls and women to have control over their bodies, …

Social class and the not-so-hidden curriculum

One of my favorite papers from my master’s program was “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by the late CUNY professor, Jean Anyon. Anyon’s work identifies and interrogates assumptions made in education about learners of low social status – primarily students of color and/or those living in poor households – and how such …

Race, class, gender, disability,…and younger-ish

I got my nails done today. Dark blue. I struggle with color choice on the rare occasions when I get a manicure, and I usually end up choosing something conservative – “classic”/“what people in Paris would wear” often goes through my head as I select the bottle of medium muted red – even though I …

The wealthy, Walmart, and Hegel’s conception of will

An article came out today in Truthout, an online news source that is decidedly liberal-to-progressive and asks tough questions that more mainstream-left media sources like NPR and PBS don’t dig into as deeply, called “You Just Got "Richsplained." A funny title and a decent takedown of an article described as “A millionaire's attempt to explain why he's better than you, …