>Disgusting. First they changed the name of my school for marketing >purposes and now they are completing the process of destruction of >radical tradition that the New School represented.
It's bad if American scholars have forgotten what democracy is, or what a university is, for sure. But can they really destroy the radical tradition of the New School ? I'd imagine the good scholars have a lot of friends in the NYC community who could make life awfully difficult for the tyrants. "Radical" is derived from the Latin "radix" meaning "root", i.e. the radical goes to the root of the matter, the heart of it, the core of things. Quine used to say, "the university is not the universe". I told students once, "research cannot not occur in a vacuum". But if those theorems are true, that means that the community could also impact on the university to rescue good thinking from narrowminded money-grubbing, since the university is not a sort of medieval castle removed from the rest of life. By the way, I didn't intend to insult you with the song bit I mentioned, it was just a thought I had at the time. The Rosdolsky reference I mentioned before is: Roman Rosdolsky, "Die Rolle des Zufalls und der "Grossen Manner" in der Geschichte" (1965) [The role of coincidence and Great men in history]. Kritik, Heft 14, Vol 5, 1977, p.. 67-96. Rosdolsky argues that revolutions cannot be "made" and that the revolutionary process does not follow an historical determinism, but occur quasi-automatically. It's quite a job to translate though, since it has 57 footnotes, where you have to look up the English editions as well for the citations. I'm still planning to do a project on Rosdolsky some time. Jurriaan
