There has likely not been a sociopolitical phenomenon more heavily documented than the Occupy Wall Street movement. What took root in Zuccotti Park and quickly blossomed in over 1000 sites throughout the United States captured the world’s imagination, but also its cameras, laptops, iPhones, and Twitter accounts. No sooner had OWS celebrated its two-month anniversary, the first “Occubooks” began to appear, offering first cuts at making sense of the most exciting populist movement to rock the United...
Louis Reyes Rivera—poet laureate and people’s historian of the CUNY movement—passed away in the early hours of March 3, 2012, leaving behind a legacy as vibrant as the Africana, Latin@merican, and Caribbean communities for whom he dedicated his life to document and praise. As evident in the dozens of public remembrances that have already surfaced since his death, Rivera will be celebrated as a tirelessly principled elder and radical artist par excellence to a huge extended family in the social...
Beloved teacher, translator, poet, scholar, and mentor, Allen Mandelbaum died on October 27th, 2011 at the age of 85. Mandelbaum is perhaps best known for his award winning translations of The Divine Comedy and the Aeneid, which won him the National Book Award in 1973, but he also published several volumes of his own poetry. He was a professor of English and Comparative literature at the Graduate Center from its founding in the 1960s until his move to Wake Forest University in 1989. During his time at...
March 1, 2012 marked the #M1 National Day of Action for Education called for by various student/teacher groups all over the country including Occupy Education and Occupy Colleges to highlight problems within the educational system, such as a lack of democratic decision-making and growing...
I know many of my colleagues don’t take student course evaluations very seriously. They claim that instructors are punished by such evaluations for maintaining standards, for rigorous grading and adherence to policies, and for not being “friends” with their students. They also...
This spring will be a crucial time for organizing at CUNY. Put plainly, things are different now. We—as CUNY students and contingent workers—are finding ourselves in the midst of a different political climate with a different emphasis on coalition-building—alongside a simultaneous...
Anyone who takes political resistance seriously must eventually confront the timeless question of tactics: which forms of resistance are appropriate to the struggle at hand; and which—if any—are not? A second set of questions necessarily accompanies the first. Namely, by what set of...
It is a common pre-conception of the New York theatrical scene that Off-Off Broadway theatre (which generally shows in houses seating fewer than one hundred audience members) can be strange, goofy, challenging, and even at times opaque. The “downtown” theatre scene of Off-Off...
In 2009 the New Museum brought us its first triennial, the cynical and surprisingly boring Younger than Jesus, which, save for the video work (especially that of Ryan Trecartin, Cyprien Gaillard, and Dineo Seshee Bopape), was mostly an ill-conceived attempt to set a new paradigm for...
Welcome to the Occupy CUNY blog. We’ll be covering the recent situation developing at CUNY around proposed tuition hikes, the protests against them, and the unacceptably forceful response from the police and university brass. We will be reporting on this crisis and...
On Friday November 18 several dozen police officers in full riot gear were called by UC Davis Chancellor or “Chief Executive Officer” Linda Katehi to disperse a crowd of occupying students at her campus. These students were all that was left of a small occupation of the campus quad...
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently opened an impressive and exhaustive retrospective of the art of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Born in Rotterdam, the Dutch artist immigrated to the United States as a ship’s stowaway in 1926. He gained notoriety and success in the New York...
In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or, the 120 Days of Sodom, was screened at Italian art houses just a few months after the controversial filmmaker was murdered. By that time, Pasolini had distinguished himself as one of the great filmmakers and cultural critics of...
Invasion! is a really fun and funny play. I want to state that right at the beginning before it gets lost in what’s to follow. Smart, funny, highly theatrical; it is proof that political theatre need neither be dry nor preachy to explore important issues. Okay: now for the rest. During...
Adjunct Healthcare under Attack—PSC Members fight back The start of the new academic year could mark the beginning of an adjunct healthcare bloodbath if the rising cost of insurance, CUNY’s “meh” attitude, and the city’s blind eye to the welfare of adjuncts aren’t successfully...
