Beyond the Academy Program Online

We’ve got a fabulous group of scholars engaged in public life coming to the DC area next month for the Beyond the Academy conference.  Check out the program with papers ranging from the university as agitator to walking in the footsteps of Dubois in the black belt and a keynote by Dan Kemmis, author of Community and the Politics of Place.  If you want to attend, be sure to register soon while space is still available.

Enough

According to Paul Begala, the core of the Democratic Party are hardworking white Americans. And according to the Clinton-camp logic, hardworking white American women should line up behind Hillary. It seems to take a Republican, namely Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal, to point out the logic of what’s happening to the Democratic Party if people like me—hardworking white American women—don’t speak up.

I am a hardworking American. I am white. I am a woman. And I’d like Hillary Clinton to bow out now.

But maybe Paul Begala would like to say that having an education negates my American credentials. But to that I’d remind Paul that we first met when he was student-body president at the University of Texas at Austin. Yes, even the Clinton folk have their share of degrees.

Reports from Myanmar

Click here to listen in on what Burmese bloggers are reporting about the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis, as well as reports on relief efforts.

By Hook or Crook?

She’s not going to win the nomination by hook, and let’s hope she stops aiming to win it by crook.  The numbers just don’t add up for Hillary Clinton.  It’s time for her to bow out.  Here’s the Huffington Post’s analysis.

The Tally Tonight

In terms of delegates won in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, as of about 11 p.m. eastern time, it looks like Clinton has picked up  35 delegates and Obama has picked up 42.  According to CNN, Obama leads Clinton in delegate count by 150 delegates.

Beyond the Academy Registration

Meeting just outside the nation’s capital in the midst of a presidential campaign year, public scholars from across the country will discuss the ways in which their work is more than “academic,” how it helps strengthen democratic institutions and public life and can bring about civic change.

To register for the Beyond the Academy Conference taking place in Arlington, VA, June 10-11, 2008, please go here.

Registration is free and open to the public. Participants in the conference should register as well. If you have worked on a book that is germane to the conference, on the registration page please include the book title, author or editors, and publisher information with your registration. If you have the ISBN handy, please include that too.

More information on the conference is available at http://beyondtheacademy.wordpress.com/

Please spread the word to your networks.

Rick Roderick Lives

Wonders of the digital era — someone has digitized and uploaded a twenty-year-old interview with Rick Roderick, whom I first met when he was getting his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Texas. I was an undergrad in history, but conversations with him ultimately moved me to philosophy, not for the love of Plato or Kant, but for the love of changing the world. Rick died way too young, in 2002, of too much stress and cigarettes. He always knew he was going to die young. I’m glad the digital era lets his words and voice live on in this 30-minute piece. Even with production values that were low twenty years ago, the tape is mesmerizing. Rick was a true Texo-Marxist American intellecutal, as moved by Woody Guthrie, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky as he was by Adorno, Marcuse, and Guy Debord. Click here for the video.

(There are other tapes of his lectures on the web but none so far that I’ve found to be Mac friendly. And from what I gather, none are this candid.)

Irregular Americans

The Democratic Party stretches over but is divided by two different demographics, upscale liberals and the working class, notes David Brooks on todays’s New York Times’s op ed page:

We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.

In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.

Likewise, younger upscale liberals across the country are voting for Obama. There are lots of factors involed: rural vs. urban, income, age. But the main factor seems to be education. The more educated, the more likely to lean toward Obama.

Oddly, among Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter), being favored by the educated is nothing to brag about it. To the contrary, Clinton brags that she represents regular Americans, meaning, I suppose, those with at most a year or two of college. According to this logic, I gather that every degree I’ve gotten (and I have racked up several) has made me less and less regular or less and less American. Is this the land of the free and the home of the quasi-literate?

Oops. Sorry. I’m being elitist.

Perhaps we’d be better off in the world if we started valuing intellect instead of trying to hide it.

Living Modern

I just completed a long project — chairing my neighborhood’s house and garden tour committee. My motivation was both civic and philosophical. That latter being my keen interest in mid-century modernism and how my neighborhood, Hollin HIlls, about eight miles south of D.C., is one of the exemplars of modernism. Of course the walls of windows spring leaks, as do the flat roofs. But oh my are these houses for living. To get a sense, see Modern Capital’s wrap-up of the tour. Also see Juliana Sohn’s photos or the story in last year’s March issue of Wallpaper Magazine.

eight points

As of 10 p.m. eastern time, April 22, in Pennsylvania Clinton has 54% of the democratic votes to Obama’s 46%. Not surprsing for her, but nothing like the double-digit spread she got in Ohio and Texas, and not enough to get a lead in the overall delegate total. Obama still has 135 more regular delegates nationally than Clinton.