Politics & Labor
Failure to Exercise Due Care
At 4pm on Thursday, September 24, I was arrested and charged with a “failure to exercise due care.” I was not alone, and this wasn’t some prank gone awry. Over two hundred people took over a large section of Chicago Avenue in front of the Park Hyatt hotel, with some seven hundred more standing... »
The Bronze Age: Harold Lucas fights to preserve Bronzeville’s historic heritage
Of all Chicago’s neighborhoods, Bronzeville boasts some of the most hotly contested real estate in the city. Developers of the South Loop’s upscale condos threaten to build their way down State Street, gentrifying Bronzeville from the north. The University of Chicago campus extends in an ever-encompassing radius from the south. And now, with the... »
Breaking it Up: Student activism runs amok at NYU
In his essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau wrote of the government to which he refused to pay taxes, “I saw that the State was half-witted…and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.” Thoreau—followed by generations of non-violent... »
Revolution in the Making
In the library of Ida Noyes Hall, in front of an ornate fireplace and wood- paneled walls, underneath the carved ceilings and hanging chandeliers, Bill Ayers sat behind a table and spoke to an attentive crowd of fifty or so student activists: “The world is too fucked up to look at all at once.... »
Sociology of Race
On Thursday, February 24, the Organization of Black Students brought famed and decorated social psychologist Dr. William Julius Wilson to deliver the 2009 George E. Kent Lecture. Dr. Wilson worked as a professor at the University of Chicago for twenty-four years, until 1996, and also served as the chair of the sociology department. He... »
The Wright Stuff
Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s February 10 appearance at Rockefeller Chapel was more of a sermon in three acts than the workshop it was billed as. He opened with a meandering anecdote loosely centered on University of Chicago professor Dwight Hopkins, who along with Wright was part of a coterie that coaxed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro... »
The Anti-Renaissance Man: One Chicago teacher fights to save the city’s public schools
Education administrators in business suits are gathered, miniature complimentary bottles of San Pellegrino in hand. This is the “CPS Senior Staff Retreat,” and at the front of the Gleacher Center meeting room sits Ron Huberman, the newly-ordained CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, recently transferred by Mayor Daley from his position as the head... »
The Indignities of Wage Theft
Scrawled in bold letters across the classroom’s blackboard was the evening’s topic of discussion: Wage Theft. Billed under the title “Thou Shall Not Steal: Putting an End to the National Epidemic of Wage Theft,” the event aimed to both define the phenomenon of wage theft and to recognize the various ways in which Chicago... »
