Monday, March 5, 2018
GOOD NEWS
Thanks to Todd Gitlin's interventions and efforts, he and I have jumped through all the hoops and cleared all the bureaucratic hurdles. Next semester [Fall 2018, the 50th anniversary of the great Columbia student uprising] Todd and I will teach an upper level undergraduate seminar in the Columbia Sociology Department entitled The Mystifications of Social Reality. It is scheduled for Tuesdays, 2-4 pm, and I shall fly up to New York each Tuesday to teach. It should be a blast.
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6 comments:
That sounds very promising.
I hope that you can tape it and that we can see (or at least listen to) it.
To s. wallerstein's comment, w/ respect I tend to think this should not be taped. It's an undergraduate seminar, by Pr. Wolff's own description, not a lecture course. That means, as in almost any seminar, that the students will be actively participating in the discussion, not simply listening to Wolff and Gitlin talk at them for 2 hours. Wolff and Gitlin know a lot and presumably have a lot to say (omit the word "presumably" in Wolff's case), but if the course consists of 2 hours of them talking and the students listening, it won't be a seminar. It will be a lecture course.
Assuming it is in fact a seminar, I doubt it shd be taped b.c that could have (not nec. but possibly) an inhibitory effect on the discussion. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted someone tape-recording or otherwise preserving an audio or visual record of the undergrad seminars that I took. The thought that there might be a taped record somewhere of what my 19-yr-old or 20-yr-old self said about anything is off-putting. Luckily I know that there is no such record.
LFC,
I imagine that each class begins with a short talk by either Wolff or Gitlin, which could be taped.
ok
p.s. I would make an exception in these kinds of situations for a record, made w everyone's knowledge/consent, to be used for solely internal purposes in the college or univ concerned (Columbia in this case) in the context of a center for instructional methods (or center for teaching/learning, or whatever) that many institutions seem to have now (either b.c the institutions are genuinely interested in improving teaching, or for cosmetic reasons, or both).
That 1968 is the 50th anniversary of the student uprising at Columbia has of course occupied my mind these days. Such commemorations as I know of that are happening will be this semester. I don't know of anything in the fall. You may have heard of the book A Time to Stir, edited by Paul Cronin, consisting of short essays by people who were there then. Different student groups are represented, not only SDS and its sympathizers but its opponents, the so-called Majority Coalition. Faculty, in particular the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, are underrepresented, perhaps because nearly all its principal leaders are dead. (I think Cronin could have got something from Immanuel Wallerstein.)
Cronin has been working for years on film about these events, which will be shown at Columbia on April 29. I badly wanted to see it, but the best I could do was to get onto a waiting list. I'm still hopeful.
Charles
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