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“Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.”

- Walter Benjamin, 1936

Yale, Singapore and the power of a university

Josh Booth 4 October 2012

The recent announcement of the president of Yale University to the effect that he will step down from his office next June, allegedly because of tension about the new Yale-branded college in Singapore, was a small tsunami in the world of academia – and raised a broader question: what role do universities have in today's society?

The significance of the resignation of Yale's President

Jim Sleeper 10 September 2012

Yale's President lost the support of his faculty. His preplacement must understand that the University, enshrining the freedoms that thoughtful engagement requires and carrying them for society at large, has no place for the iron law of oligarchy

How Yale becomes more Confucian, rather than Singapore more civic-republican

Jim Sleeper 10 June 2012

Yale's Singaporean adventure, continued ... The crucible of civic-republican leadership is compromising its soul for the sake of what? The author is whispered the motive - Yale means business. Unsurprising but not uplifting

Yale's Singaporean adventure - a victory for the ideals of the republic?

Jim Sleeper 8 April 2012

Yale's Singaporean adventure may still be going ahead, even after a faculty rebellion over the issue. But the vote really is a moment of institutional awakening against the sinister fusion of American and Asian models of state capitalism. That fusion threatens a civic-republican ideal that conservatives and liberals ought both to be preserving. Maybe the Yale rebellion is the begining of a recognition of all that is at risk

University campuses in the Far East - money, power or democracy?

Jim Sleeper 18 March 2012

Yale should have proud independence from the lures of power and money in its bones. That does not mean shunning either, but treating both as servants of a better ideal. But the recent announcement of a campus in Singapore suggests that it has forgotten that stance. More generally, this sort of forgetting is a danger to the fabric of democracy

This week's editor

Niki Seth-Smith is a freelance journalist and co-editor of OurKingdom.

Europe from the bottom up

European Union stars in Paris. Flickr/notarim. Some rights reserved.

A new Europe can only come from the bottom up
Etienne Balibar

A social Europe must be a political Europe
Bo Stråth

As Europe is provincialized: a reply to Etienne Balibar
Sandro Mezzadra

European debate

A republican call for a basic income
Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark

Nuclear non-proliferation

Women and the Arab Spring

oDRussia at journalismfestival .com

Mali - the plot thickens

Remote control war

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