Samizdat, Beautiful Italy, January 10, 2021
Posted by Mary Grabar, January 10, 2021: What is samizdat? I learned about it while taking a two-week writing seminar in Prague. According to Merriam-Webster it was a method "by which government-suppressed literature was clandestinely printed and distributed." This happened in the Soviet Union and "countries within its orbit." Recent events have reminded me of that lecture by a writer who had experienced such persecution and censorship. So please distribute this link via Dissident Prof and not the article or video because they are being censored and blocked by social media. Thank you.
Photo credt: By Megan Mallen - Flickr: Piemonte, Italy, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16210487
A New Direction or the Status Quo for University Leadership: The Case of the University of Chicago
By Matthew Andersson, M.B.A. 1996, The Booth School of Business, University of Chicago (posted by Mary Grabar, November 23, 2020);
As at other universities, in the search for a new president of the University of Chicago, we should be aware of security concerns regarding alliances with foreign powers, especially China.
The higher education sector is perennially in the news for a number of reasons: they include the exploding student debt challenge; sky-high tuition costs; politically correct curricula and speech accommodation; ideological bias and propagation; and the current impacts on campus operations due to the covid phenomenon, which is having a devastating impact on university finances, and faculty and student morale. The higher education sector is crying out for leadership. It tends to change hands very slowly, and like modern public corporations, it generally resists change. One university is a current case example, and may be instructive for the larger university and college industry.
One of America’s most storied institutes of higher education, the University of Chicago, has established a formal search for a new president. As university presidents report to their Boards (like commercial corporations), the governance bodies are charged with filling this administrative role, and to a unusual degree are highly dependent on it, as most university boards (or regents, fellows and other structures) consist of volunteer executives who look on a university or college board seat as a kind of philanthropy, and rarely have any formal experience in any educational institutions.
Speaking in Athens, GA
Speaking Athens, GA, Eagle Forum, Thursday, February 6, 2020.:The Smith House, 1760 Old Epps Bridge Road, Athens, GA
Professor and author, Mary Grabar, will discuss her recent book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America
Books will be for sale.
6:30 Refreshments
7:00 Meeting
CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER
Debunking Howard Zinn Portland to Atlanta Speaking Tour
Posted March 10, 2020: The Dissident Prof has been doing some traveling: Portland, Oregon: St. Louis, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; and here in Georgia where she is wintering in Atlanta, Fayetteville, and Athens. Here is the video of my talk at the Constitutional Coalition/Eagle Council Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis. Notices for three events next week follow an account of my talk at Portland State University by an impressive young man I met there, Brandon Smith, a recent graduate of that university and former student of Political Science Professor, Bruce Gilley, who as President of the Oregon Association of Scholars invited me to give the talk.
Leaving Our Children a Better Worldview by Brandon Smith
My curiosity about Howard Zinn began in my young adulthood in Portland, Oregon, during the mid-2000s when I had more access to motion pictures and music than I did to substantive scholarship. Good Will Hunting and NOFX's “Franco Un-American” both seemed to endorse Zinn's work as a proper starting point for cultivating one's worldview. Being concerned with my own capacity for democratic decision-making in the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. presidential election and terrorist attacks of 9/11, I took it upon myself to read Zinn's A People's History of the United States in hope of becoming a more enlightened citizen with a deeper understanding of what brought the world to that particular point in history.
Read more: Debunking Howard Zinn Portland to Atlanta Speaking Tour
National Vietnam War Veterans Day 2020
Posted by Mary Grabar on March 30, 2020, Article by W.R. Baker, originally published at Small Wars Journal on March 29 (republished with permission): Dulce bellum inexpertis – “War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It”
While March 29th is National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the “official” federal remembrance day (August 18th in Australia and New Zealand), each of us who went to war will probably remember not only the date we left the United States and the date we returned, but also certain events in-between that occurred in the land which President Reagan called “…100 rice paddies and jungles in a place called Vietnam.”
The individual Vietnam remembrance day might be the day you were first fired upon (perhaps shelled, mortared, or shot at) or the day wounded – occurring with those who became your closest family, who you relied upon each day, just as they did you. War has a way of throwing the best and the worst things at you all at once and Vietnam certainly proved that.