‘Carl L. Bankston III’ Archives
My Inequality Course
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III An article by Charlotte Allen and George Leef, published online at both Minding the Campus and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, recently singled out a course I teach, entitled "Wealth, Power, & Inequality," as the only one they could find that provides a balanced approach to teaching about social [...]
Desegregation Nostalgia
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III In “Making Schools Work,” in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, David L. Kirp repeats a tale repeatedly told by Gary Orfield and the other advocates of the racial redistribution of public school students through “command and control” techniques. According to this story, coercive redistribution of [...]
The New Minority
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III The U.S. Census Bureau reported yesterday that non-white babies (under 1) in the United States outnumbered white babies for the first time. Although a Wall Street Journal article on this phenomenon denies that this is due to immigration, attributing it instead to higher birth rates among non-whites, I think it can [...]
Urban Decay Chic
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Will Doig writes in the online magazine Salon about “Rust Belt chic.” It seems that Rust Belt cities, including Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit, have been drawing young people in the 22 to 34 year-old demographic. These new settlers, according to the article, tend to be “knowledge economy” workers, drawn by the [...]
Commencement
CARL L. BANKSTON III Now that commencement season is here, I’m reminded of some of my favorite quotations on the handing out of credentials. I think of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who once announced “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated [...]
Contemporary Scholarship
CARL L. BANKSTON III Sociology graduate student Nathan Jurgenson, writing in Inside Higher Ed, makes the argument that academics must make their ideas available and accessible to the public. He maintains that they must try to communicate more widely in order to make more understandable and relevant to a wider range of people. I tend to agree [...]
You Can’t Say That
CARL L. BANKSTON III Is Black Studies a legitimate academic discipline? This seems like a question one should be able to ask, and a question that different people would answer in different ways. Naomi Schaefer Riley, formerly a blogger on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, recently learned that this is one of the many questions that [...]
A Kinder, Gentler Soviet Experiment?
CARL L. BANKSTON III We know that Joseph Stalin ordered the murders of millions of people, but in a few individual cases his responsibility remains unclear. He probably had Sergei Kirov killed in order in order to create a pretext for the purges of the 1930s. He also might have been behind the death of the writer Maxim Gorky. Now, Russian [...]
Genealogy in the Era of Diversity
CARL L. BANKSTON III My grandfather used to enjoy driving around the back roads of Louisiana. When he’d see some old folks sitting on rocking chairs out on their porch, he’d often pull over to chat. The most common topic of conversation was: who were your parents and who are your kin? Since almost everyone was related (often in multiple [...]
Totalitarianism Revisited
CARL L. BANKSTON III In an article in World Affairs, Alan Johnson asks how Communism could be making a comeback among a cadre of intellectuals after the ideology's history of misery and mass murder during the twentieth century. Johnson maintains that the new Communists have little interest in history, which explains their ability to overlook [...]
Taking a Stand
CARL L. BANKSTON III An article in Inside Higher Ed poses the question of whether college faculties should vote to take institutional stands on public issues. The publication reports the events at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota, where the faculty voted 24-7 in favor of a resolution opposing a proposed amendment to the state [...]
The Castle at Santorini
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Image of a skull, the ruined castle sat there on the hillside. Sockets of empty windows showed the road their aged, sightless stare. We climbed the stairs, bent beneath our packs as if we were two thieves, hauling our loads of goods and guilt slung across our backs. A [...]
Trotsky Revised Again
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Yesterday evening (April 29, 2012), the television program Sixty Minutes has an interesting segment on the work of Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, on the effects of drug use on the brain and on why addictions are so difficult to overcome. One of Dr. Volkow's best points, I thought, was that [...]
Diversity Training Follies
CARL L. BANKSTON III Several bloggers have recently drawn attention to an article on the ineffectiveness of “diversity training” in Psychology Today, among them Walter Olson at “Overlawyered” and Hans Bader at OpenMarket.org. The article, by Peter Bregman, recounts the author’s own fruitless experiences in running diversity [...]
A Question of Self-Interest
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III "Don't Tax you. Don't Tax me. Tax that man behind the tree." - Senator Russell Long The interest rate on student loans will jump from its present 3.4% to 6.8%, if the present low rates are not extended for a year by the beginning of July. Unfortunately, this one year extension, if passed will cost an estimated $5.9 [...]
The Rebirth of Hype
CARL L. BANKSTON III The sad death of a young man in Florida continues to receive ever more hallucinatory responses. Here, at my university, in a city where young black men slaughter each other on a daily basis, the extraordinarily atypical case of a black teenager killed by a white Hispanic, in a city far to our east, became the topic of a [...]
The Federal Funding Fiasco
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Immediately after Congress passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, I saw colleagues in the university forming research groups to figure out what they could study to get some of the money, which was largely available through the National Science Foundation (NSF). In designing their research, they [...]
The History of Psychoanalysis
CARL L. BANKSTON III For good or ill, psychoanalysis was one of the most influential intellectual movements of the last century.. From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, though, it has also been one of the most controversial and its future is in doubt. Many academic psychologists today reject psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience, and [...]
Biology and Society
CARL L. BANKSTON III What are the links between biology and social organization? Many people today, especially in academia, assert that there are no links, that everything about human beings is "socially constructed," and that to think otherwise is not only factually wrong, but morally despicable. Thus, when Harry Ostrer published his [...]
Light Along the Erie Canal
By Carl Bankston III Across the water's surface, curves corner the sun and heave it forth in glimmers, as man's mind serves to catch, reflect a sun-like force in scattered sparks. Above, the birds scoop waves in wind, ripple and pour between suns caught on air and earth. From their flexions flash darts as bright as those between the [...]
Strange New Rights in Education Law
CARL L. BANKSTON III The continual expansion of rights in contemporary legal theory leads to some pretty bizarre policy suggestions. Among the looniest that I have seen recently comes from Derek W. Black (pictured here), Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Education Rights Center at Howard University School of Law. In an article in [...]
Demographics and the Limits of School Reform
BY CARL BANKSTON III School reform is a hot topic these days. The various reform efforts (charter schools, vouchers, increased accountability for teachers and school boards, and the availability of transfers for students out of schools with poor performance records) generally aim at improving overall achievement and eliminating “achievement [...]
Preaching a New Civics Gospel
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III The Spring 2012 issue of the journal Democracy features a trilogy of articles calling for a new emphasis on “civic responsibility.” Introducing these articles, the editors observe that” f progressive politics over the past half century is identified with one activity more than any other, we think there is no [...]
Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest
CARL L. BANKSTON III Niall Ferguson is a prolific author, with a seemingly endless flow of ideas. I found his The Ascent of Money (2008) a useful and interesting general work on debt and finance, and I have drawn on it in my own thinking about the financialization of the American economy. I also appreciated his earlier work The Cash Nexus [...]
April is the Cruelest Month
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Have you ever heard someone say, "these taxes are killing me"? Apparently, this is more than a figure of speech. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Canadian researchers have found that traffic deaths go up an average of 6 percent on the day that taxes are due. According the researchers, this isn't the [...]
Male Call
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III My university recently hosted educator and activist Tony Porter (pictured here), who spoke about violence against women. According to the description of his talk, Mr. Porter issued "a call to men to respect women." That sounds fine to me. I think men should respect women. I also take a number of other bold moral [...]
Dictionaries
CARL L. BANKSTON III There is an old game that consists of asking, “if you were stranded on a desert island with only one book, what book would you want?” If “book” can be interpreted as “publication,” my immediate answer would be “the Oxford English Dictionary,” That might be cheating. It is difficult to imagine my raft [...]
Up From Slavery and the Ideal of a Self-Made Man
CARL L. BANKSTON III In 1954, the historian Irvin G. Wyllie declared in The Self-Made Man in America that “the legendary hero of America is the self-made man” As Wyllie recognized, the phrase “self-made man” only became common in public means of communication in the late 1820s, but Americans looked back into their history to connect a [...]
The AdvanceNOLA Boondoggle
CARL L. BANKSTON III The AdvanceNOLA program of Tulane's Cowen Institute here in New Orleans strikes me as a bizarre manifestation of the "college for everyone" crusade. According to the program's website, the funding for the program comes from a $1.6 million dollar grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation and a "generous donation" from the [...]
A Dubious Honor
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III My university was recently named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for the sixth consecutive year. This honor roll is an initiative of the Corporation for National & Community Service. The website of that organization describes it as follows: The President's Higher Education Community [...]
