An academic "war of pamphlets" led to an attack on the vocation and work of the friars.
I'm from the East Coast, and I feel like Michigan is this place where people know how to work with their hands, you know, guys with calluses and beat-up jeans, oil underneath their eyes like war paint.... Academic: War paint.
The grounds of the academic war zone that surrounds Israel/Palestine are booby-trapped and they are shifting.
For the ASA to declare a kind of academic war on Israeli academics and universities is to attack the people who are fighting for freedom of expression on the front lines.
The latest melee in the academic war zone focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict is taking place at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where Steven Salaita had a written offer for tenured employment in American Indian Studies revoked by Chancellor Phyllis Wise.
On the evidence of Bruce Bawer's fighting-mad book, "The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind," this rule holds true for the academic culture wars as well.
His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.
Benford, clearly a veteran of academic funding wars, opens his cleverly structured novel with a quotation from Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, who noted, at the beginning of the Age of Discovery in the late 15th century, that "no mariners or merchants would... ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit".
Universities are made up of often rigid silos and many academics are more concerned about academic turf wars than attacking the world's biggest problems.
In Cambridge, the group included liberal and conservative academics, pro-war and anti-war protesters and aspiring CEOs seated next to blossoming philosophers and novelists.
