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This is a wild story! So, in the late sixties, George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic crew were tripping balls on LSD on their way to a gig in Pittsburgh. Billy Bates, one of the founders, thought he'd be clever and take a shortcut, driving right past a barricade. — Read the rest
The disdain shown to us by Queen Mary University of London inspired me to redouble my efforts on the picket lines. Staff and students have had enough
On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.
I hadn’t always felt so jaded. I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research, working in the subject I cared passionately about. But several things quickly became clear. There was the increasing precarity of university labour: one-third of academics are on fixed-term contracts, 41% are on hourly paid contracts and there are still 29 institutions employing at least five academic staff on zero-hours contract. In 2021, it was reported that pay had been cut by 20% in real-terms over the past 12 years, while changes to the pension scheme mean that we’ve taken a 35% cut to our guaranteed retirement income despite contributing more. Meanwhile, university and college staff are doing the equivalent of two days’ unpaid work every week on average. It’s an environment that leaves me feeling, like many others, disillusioned and questioning my future.
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
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A quarter are regularly going without food and other essentials, a new Russell Group Students’ Unions study reveals
One in five students at Russell Group universities are considering dropping out because of the cost of living crisis, and a quarter are regularly going without food and other essentials, the Observer can reveal.
In the largest study of its kind, new research by the Russell Group Students’ Unions – which represents 24 of Britain’s most elite higher education institutions, including Oxbridge, UCL and Edinburgh – for the first time lays bare the devastating impact soaring prices are having on all but the richest students.
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On Tuesday morning when I made my way to the sacred circle, past the resilient tree, to Linton Hall there was a silence such as I had never heard before. It was not the silence of a holiday break or of freshly fallen snow … it was the silence of a broken world. It was the presence of an absence—Arielle, Alexandria, Brian. It was the sound of grief and loss and emptiness.
It took my breath away.
So I paused to find a way back to my breath, to settle there and listen, to bring my heart and mind close to absence and to quietude, so I might begin to mourn and grieve.
“Breath is a practice of presence.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned, 21.
Let me resist the urge to make sense of what makes no sense. What is given us to learn, perhaps, is absence—the withdrawal of being.
Let me be present to this absence here, so I might find a way to be present for others.
A gift appears from my friend and colleague Ruth Nicole Brown, Chair of the Department of African American and African Studies: A poem by Howard Thurman. It points a way and I follow.
For a Time of Sorrow
I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.
In the “silent storm-swept barreness of so great a loss” there are no words … and yet here the words find me, press me to find more words, not so much as to make sense, but so we might find a way more deeply into the absence and to the connections that somehow make it bearable.
So just fragments here … words that have found me and images captured as we make a way.
The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this instant.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, 144.
Another gift finds me, this one from my friend and colleague Tani Hartman, Chair of the Department of Art, Art History, and Design— a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “II, 29” [“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”]:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
I flow, I am; or at least I try to be—try to find a way toward meaning at this crossroads…
MSU, we love thy shadows
When twilight silence falls.
Flushing deep, and softly paling
O’er ivy covered halls.
Beneath the pines we’ll gather
To give our faith so true.
Sing our love for alma mater
And thy praises MSU.
Welcoming MSU students back to campus.
A week that began with a nightmare, ended with a dream.
On Tuesday morning, I received the call from my wife I’ve long dreaded—she said there was a 911 call about an active shooter in the high school and that our daughter was on lockdown in her classroom. The next few hours were consumed with determining precisely what was happening and if our daughter was safe. It turned out to be a hoax perpetrated on a series of Michigan communities by someone who called 911 purporting to be a teacher in the building where the shooting was actively unfolding.
Meanwhile, the actual teachers in Okemos High School were bravely protecting our children, pushing bookcases in front of doors, moving students into closets, and putting their bodies between danger and the lives of our kids.
Such is the diseased life of education in these United States in this, the twenty-third year of the 21st century.
I am grateful for the teachers and staff and police who moved so quickly to protect our students; I am heartsick that to be an educator in this country means to put your life at risk every single day.
Contrast this dystopian reality with the joy and possibility embodied in Angela Davis’s visit to MSU on Thursday as a speaker in the 2023 William G. Anderson Lecture Series: From Slavery to Freedom.
Prompted by Dr. Marita Gilbert‘s beautiful invitation to reflect upon those who influenced her, Davis began with her parents and their love of learning. They instilled in her a deep commitment to social justice and a sophisticated understanding of the transformative power of ideas. Both were reinforced by her encounter with Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher, social-critic, and member of the Frankfurt School, who taught her that “philosophy could be a tool for revolutionary change.”
Over the course to almost two hours on Thursday, Davis focused our attention on the conditions that make such revolutionary change both urgent and necessary. She reminded us that the corrosive individualism that pervades contemporary culture is a delusion that must give way—that is beginning to give way—to a deeper recognition of our human interconnectedness with one another and the natural world. She put it this way:
“We would not be who we are without relationality with others.”
This deep existential truth awakens us to the profound responsibilities we have to one another and to the earth we share, responsibilities to which Davis called us when she emphasized that environmental justice is “ground zero of all social justice.” To recognize environmental justice as the root of all social justice is to expand the scope and complexity of how we think about justice and who we consider when we seek it. This requires an intersectional approach to our ways of being in the world. For Davis, intersectionality is a “habit of thinking things together,” a habit she practiced with us throughout the evening.
In reflection on the struggle for freedom, Davis pressed us not to think of freedom as a discrete goal, but as a journey. The tendency to think of freedom as a destination pulls us away from the vitality of freedom as a project, as a task that animates our lives.
Here again she emphasized complexity, and specifically, the “growing complexity of what it means to be free.” This complexity is felt, for example, in the ways contemporary culture is beginning to move beyond the gender binary, a shift that has brought with it a vociferous backlash intent on reinforcing the status quo.
Indeed, I was moved most by what Davis said about the political function of ideology to reinforce the status quo. “Racism,” she recognized, “is an ideology, a system.”
“The work of ideology is to persuade us that what exists must exist.”
To be conscious of the ways ideology operates on us is already to begin to initiate meaningful change. This was the great hope that emerged during our two hours with Davis on Thursday evening. That hope was, for me, reinforced by her remarks that when future generations look back upon this period of history, they will recognize it as a time of significant cultural transformation.
Young people, Davis emphasized, increasingly understand that racism is structural; they recognize the fluidity of gender and the complexity of our interconnected lives. The role of education here is vital, for education has an unparalleled ability to disrupt the status quo and to move us toward more just and sustainable ways of being together.
In emphasizing the transformative change through which we are living, Davis perhaps would agree with Angel Kyoto Williams, who said:
“There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift.”
Let eduction advance the dying of denial and cultivate the intersectional habits of thinking and acting we need to nurture and sustain a more just interconnected world.
Black Mountains College in Wales aims to prepare students for life during a planetary emergency
The lecture theatre was once a cowshed, the study centre is an old farmhouse living room and the classrooms are mostly outdoors: welcome to the newest higher educational college in Britain.
The former farm that is Black Mountains College campus is a core part of an insurgent institution that is the first entirely dedicated to adapting to the climate emergency.
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“The ONSEN collection is very simple and blends well with diverse architectural spaces. We developed it with the intention of transmitting calm, like Japanese architecture. We are inspired by rationality, by geometry, and elemental shapes that do not need heavy ornamentation,” said designers Francesco Meda and David Quincoces.
When Wallpaper* announced their 2023 Design Awards winners, Gandiablasco’s ONSEN came out on top in the “Best Outdoor Lounge” category. The iconic collection is lightweight, practical, and cozy – all things Wallpaper* considers when choosing ideal outdoor furniture. Smart decisions were made throughout the series’ design that features calm, clean, refined lines borrowed from elements of Japanese architecture.
ONSEN’s materials are chosen just as carefully, with efforts taken to maintain their natural properties. The structure of each piece is constructed from uncoated stainless-steel tubes, with the rest of the design employing repetitive vinyl straps resembling leather. Highly resistant and functional, the collection wraps up with two low coffee tables using the same steel. For their surfaces there’s a choice between thermos-lacquered aluminum – Gandiablasco’s flagship material – or iroko wood slats.
Onsen Lounge Chair
Onsen Lounge Chair
Onsen Lounge Chair
Onsen Sectional Sofa 4
Onsen Sectional Sofa 4
Onsen Sectional Sofa 2
Onsen 2-Seat Sofa
Onsen Coffee Table 153
Onsen Coffee Table 76
Onsen Coffee Table
To learn more about Onsen, visit gandiablasco.com.
Raising maintenance loans by only 2.8% means students will have to cut back on food and books, says report
The Department for Education has admitted students in England face a “negative impact” from its refusal to increase support in line with inflation, saying they will have to cut back on food and books as a result.
In an equality analysis of the government’s decision to raise maintenance loans by just 2.8% from autumn, the DfE said student support would have needed to go up by nearly 14% to keep up with the recent rises in the cost of living.
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Students are pleading for reforms amid rising rent and cost of living, as experts warn research could suffer if people are put off higher study
When Maddy Hoffman started her PhD in Perth in 2019, the stipend was $500 a week. The cheapest place she could find to rent was $300 – more than half her weekly income.
If it weren’t for her partner, she said her PhD in nuclear radiation simply “wouldn’t have happened”.
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One in four students say they are in danger of dropping out of university – survey
Students are skipping meals and relying on hardship funds and family support because of the cost of living crisis, with one in four saying they are in danger of dropping out of university, according to a survey.
Research carried out for the Sutton Trust found nearly a quarter of the 1,000 UK students interviewed said they were “less likely” to be able to complete their degree because of cost pressures, while one in three from working class families said they were cutting down on food to save money.
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Labour says inflation may force more students to drop out, as those in England get just £200 more on average
Students from Wales will get £1,000 more to help with the cost of living crisis while those in England get just £200 on average, as Labour MPs said inflation may force more students to drop out of university.
The Welsh government said maintenance loans and grants for its students would rise by 9.4% from September, with support for full-time students increasing from £10,710 to £11,720 on average. Students in England will get a rise of just 2.8% in the next academic year after the Westminster government’s announcement last week, with the average maintenance loan increasing by about £200.
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The infectious smile beaming forth from this kid living life to the fullest while riding a motorcycle on Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is divine.
The beauty of the scenic background belies the harshness of the environment, but the resulting dreamlike video sequences like this make it worth the cost. — Read the rest
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