One night this spring, the New York Institute for the Humanities hosted a gathering to discuss, as the title of the event put it, “new public intellectuals.” At the front of a crowded room, seated at a rectangular table, were three paragons of this ascendant breed — Nikil Saval, co-editor of n+1; Sarah Leonard, a senior editor at The Nation; and Jon Baskin, co-editor of The Point. All are under 40, not pursuing careers in academe, and integral to what the event’s organizers hailed as a “renaissance in cultural journalism.”

It is a notably upbeat claim, especially when compared with the hand-wringing that typically accompanies talk of public intellectuals in America, who seem always to be in the act of vanishing. The few who remain pale in comparison to the near-mythic minds that roamed the streets of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when rents were cheap, polemics were harsh, and politics were radical. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. What happened? Intellectuals who couldn’t survive as freelance writers — and as New York gentrified, who could? — became professors. By the 1960s, few nonacademic intellectuals remained. Careerism and specialization gradually opened up a gulf between intellectuals and the public. The sturdy prose of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe gave way, by the mid-90s, to the knotted gender theorizing of Judith Butler and the cult-studies musings of Andrew Ross.

If an intellectual renaissance is underway, the catalyst has been the spate of little magazines that have appeared in the past decade or so: Jacobin, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, n+1, The Point, Public Books. At the same time, older publications, like Dissent, have been rejuvenated; dormant magazines, like The Baffler,have been resurrected. James Livingston likens the present moment to the first few decades of the last century, when magazines including The Dial, The New Republic, and Modern Quarterly, reoriented intellectual life in America. “Between 1900 and 1930, those little magazines defined the literary canon and came up with all these ideas of how to reform the market ” says Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. “It was an incredible time of intellectual ferment. Our time is similar in that everyone knows we have to do something radical.”

Read the entire post here.

A few weeks ago, I had a good experience using a new educational-technology tool. I also had a bad experience using a new educational-technology tool. Actually, they were the same experience and the same tool.

Anybody who has spent any time experimenting with educational-technology knows exactly why that is not a contradiction in terms.

The tool in question was the online annotating program Hypothes.is. Most historians I’ve heard talk about Hypothes.is seem to use it only as a way for students to annotate primary sources, but I had my students use it as a means to critique each other’s papers. First I asked students to post their research paper prospectus on a blog or on Scalar (another really interesting educational technology that I’ve been using). I set up a common Scalar page to serve as the class syllabus, and put links on it to all the students’ papers. They each had five prospectuses to read and comment on over the course of a single class period.

Read the entire post here.

One hundred and ten college and university presidents have issued a joint letter to President-elect Donald Trump urging him to forcefully “condemn and work to prevent the harassment, hate and acts of violence that are being perpetrated across our nation, sometimes in your name, which is now synonymous with our nation’s highest office.”

This action is needed, the presidents write, because of the incidents taking place nationwide, including many on college campuses. “In our schools, on job sites and college campuses, on public streets and in coffee shops, members of our communities, our children, our families, our neighbors, our students and our employees are facing very real threats, and are frightened.”

The full text of the letter and the signatories may be found at the end of this article. (UPDATE: An additional 19 presidents who signed since the letter was first circulated may be found below the original list.) News coverage of some of the incidents on college campuses may be found here and here and here. (More than 450 professors at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater, have issued an open letter calling on the president-elect to “immediately and publicly denounce” the way three people in Oklahoma signed up black freshmen at Penn to receive text messages with images of violence against black people and racial slurs from someone called “Daddy Trump” or “Heil Trump.”)

Read the entire post here.

Critics credit the actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith with inventing a new form of socially conscious theater. She becomes, through uncanny mimicry, people she has interviewed. Over the past 40 years, the 66-year-old professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has won a MacArthur grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and other honors for her one-woman productions made up of interviews on a single event or theme — riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles, the health-care system, Washington’s political culture. Arizona State, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale are among the universities that have commissioned her projects on race, gender, diversity, and listening. You might also know her from roles in films including The American President or TV series like The West Wing.

Delivering the 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture, Ms. Smith cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s “inescapable network of mutuality”: “Recognizing our interconnectedness in today’s society may seem difficult,” she said, “but we could muster the courage to work for it.”

Her new work, Notes From the Field, now playing at Second Stage Theatre in New York, concerns the school-to-prison pipeline, in which disadvantaged children disproportionately become incarcerated adults. Smith selected 18 monologues from some 250 interviews, and during roughly two hours on stage, she becomes a student, an inmate, a congressman, a nonprofit director, protesters, a pastor, a principal, and more. A central theme of the show is that America needs to make a much greater investment in its children. The evening ends on a bittersweet, hopeful note, with her rendering of Rep. John Lewis recounting moments of forgiveness and grace.

Read the entire post here.

Will Donald Trump be the first “anti-science” president of the United States, as some have claimed?

He has shown almost no interest in science during his election campaign, but his few utterances in this area have sent chills through the world-leading US research community.

When conservative talk-show host Michael Savage volunteered in an interview with the now president-elect to take over the National Institutes of Health, which spends about $32 billion (£25.5 billion) a year on research, Mr Trump said that it would be a good idea.

“You would get common sense if that were the case…because I hear so much about the NIH, and it’s terrible,” explained Mr Trump of perhaps the most admired science organisation in the world.

His determination to tear up the Paris agreement on climate change, branded a Chinese “hoax” designed to kill US manufacturing, has also been cited as evidence of his anti-science outlook.

Read the entire post here.

Many minority, Muslim and/or immigrant students are reporting increased harassment since Donald Trump was elected president. On many campuses, incidents specifically include Trump’s name, and, at others, various slurs are being reported.

Racial and ethnic incidents on campus are hardly new and have been happening since well before Trump entered the presidential race. But as reports circulate about these incidents, some students are saying that things are worse. And their view has added to anxiety and anger many students feel about the outcome of the election. While many of the reports involve slurs, others include physical attacks.

Read the entire post here.  

Shortly after moving to New York two years ago, I began volunteering as a writing mentor at Minds Matter, a large, multi-city nonprofit that helps prepare underserved high-school students for college. Just a few months earlier, I’d graduated from a liberal-arts college I’d attended after participating in a similar program, and I felt both obliged to pay my good fortune forward and uniquely qualified to do so. If my experience had taught me anything, it was the power of a compelling personal narrative.

By the time I’d decided, mid-way through high school, that I wanted to attend college—and not just any college, but a competitive one, filled with Gothic Revival buildings and storied histories—I had to contend with a spotty transcript, virtually no extracurriculars, and an SAT math score inferior to that of many middle schoolers. Then I heard about QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects low-income youth with top schools.

Read the entire post here. 

For minority students and scholars, working in academe can be isolating and frustrating, especially when they feel like there’s no place to talk about the issues they face.

To give a voice to those frustrations, William J. Richardson, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Northwestern University, started a Twitter campaign calling on other academics to share examples of racism in the academy.

Read the entire post here.  

After Tiffany C. Martínez, a sociology major at Suffolk University in Boston, was called out in front of her senior seminar and accused of copying parts of an assigned literature review, she voiced her frustration in a blog post titled, “Academia, Love Me Back.”

For Ms. Martínez the phrase uttered by her professor, “This is not your language,” wasn’t just a comment about potential plagiarism, it was a microaggression — a comment about her identity as a Latina.

Read the entire post here.  

The higher education IT organization will over the next five years focus on collaboration, personalization and professional development in order to create an experience that is more “inclusive, equitable and simplified,” according to a new strategic plan.

“We’re changing the Educause experience in many of the same ways you’re being asked to change on your campus,” CEO John O’Brien said Thursday to the thousands of IT staffers attending the organization’s annual conference here this week. “We’ll navigate this future together.”

The strategic plan is the clearest indication yet of in what direction O’Brien, who became CEO in June 2015, intends to take Educause. The organization has more than 2,300 member institutions and 300 corporate partners around the world, and its events, research and policy work help set the agenda for the role of IT in higher education.

Read the entire post here.