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University of Milano-Bicocca Suspends Dostoevsky Class, Then Backtracks
Putin's crime, Dostoevsky's punishment. Well, he's dead, maybe the students' and teacher's punishment.
From Newsweek (Khaleda Rahman):
Italian writer Paolo Nori posted a video on Instagram on Tuesday saying he had received an email from officials at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Milan, informing him of the decision to postpone his [four-session course on Dostoevsky] following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Dear Professor, the Vice Rector for Didactics has informed me of a decision taken with the rector to postpone the course on Dostoevsky," the email said, according to Nori's video.
"This is to avoid any controversy, especially internally, during a time of strong tensions." …
Matteo Renzi, Italy's former prime minister who is now a senator for Florence, tweeted that it was "insane" to prohibit studying Dostoevsky because of the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin….
On Wednesday, the university released a statement on its social media accounts confirming the course would go ahead.
Glad that cooler heads seem to have prevailed, though Italian journalist Alessandra Bocchi reports that "it appears that the professor who sounded the alarm is going to get reprimanded for speaking out."
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Silliness in the county with a PM who never was elected by the citizens of Italy
Who are we to talk?
“Freedom fries”
“Liberty cabbage”
How are those remotely comparable? “french fries” is a name given to that food by Americans, and individual American businesses can decide to call them something else.
The origin of the term french fries is a bit more complex than that.
In cooking, frenching refers to:
https://www.thespruceeats.com/frenched-food-preparation-2313702
So french fries were originally fried frenched potatoes. Americans being Americans, we had to shorten it to frenched fries then just french fries.
Finally someone gets it.
Gotta love food name origins. “Worm”-i-chelli, anyone?
There was 1000000x more talk about how silly freedom fries was than people actually unironically calling it freedom fries.
Freedom kisses!
“Freedom fries” was widely seen as pretty silly back in the early 2000s; I don’t think it ever really caught on because of that. “Liberty cabbage,” as I understand it, dates from World War I; I don’t know how popular it was back then, but it certainly seems pretty silly today. And I do think that canceling university classes is worse than restaurants renaming dishes.
In 1979 or 1980 during the hostage crisis an Iranian-born girl in New Jersey was denied the right to make her valedictorian speech. That was pretty bad.
That is awful. I don’t recall hearing about that.
Look up “Tina Bahadori” and “Atlantic City High School”.
The story is not quite as you described it – apparently a teacher at the school circulated a petition objecting to her as a speaker, got many other teachers to sign on, and she subsequently withdrew. Still reflects very poorly on the school and the teachers who signed on to the petition, but not quite “denied the right to make her valedictorian speech.”
Freedom Fries
Liberty Cabbage
Do-whatever-the-hell-you-want Hot Dogs
It’s all good.
Wasn’t Dostoevsky a victim of Russian tyranny, not a proponent of it?
I think FIDE is planning on retroactively taking away the world chess champion title from Alekhine, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov, Kasparov, and Kramnik. Sorry guys!
I don’t know about all of them but Kasperov has long been an outspoken critic of Putin and his government and a number of the others are dead.
Very true. Plus Tal and Petrosian were both Soviet citizens, but weren’t Russian. Kasparov was born in Azerbaijan, and his mom was Armenian, but his father was a Russian Jew. I think he considers himself as Russian. But certainly no supporter of Putin, as Sergey Karjakin is. Curiously, Karjakin grew up in Ukraine and played for the Ukrainian team for many years.
https://chess24.com/en/read/news/fide-bans-russia-from-holding-chess-events
My clearest memory of _Crime and Punishment_ is the awkward translation of the Russian equivalent of French tutoyer, to use the familiar form of “you”. Better to teach it in a language where the T-V distinction is maintained, like Italian.
I have heard several times that if you can’t read Russian literature in Russian, the French translations tend to be better than the English ones.
Perhaps because some of it was written in French to begin with? Just a guess.
Nothing new under the sun. During World War I, Pittsburgh banned performances of Beethoven’s works.
And Wagner was not welcome in Israel.
Hmm while I certainly don’t disagree with the decision to reinstate the class I do think this brings up the larger question of how much control professors vs admin should have at universities with regards to what courses are offered. In my opinion, admin has to have at least some say (e.g. if they build a new bio lab it seems reasonable to me that they make the faculty offer more bio courses) but not too much say (e.g. admin shouldn’t be able to ban an anti-China class because they are getting funding from China) and I’m not sure where that line is. Also, at public universities, should admin have a different line than legislators or people more closely tied to the government?
Do you want education or indoctrination?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-wagner-factbox/factbox-wagner-still-controversial-in-israel-idUSBRE9BG1E120131217
From a similar article, “Barenboim, who spent his teenage years in Israel, led the musicians in the performance of Richard Wagner’s “Overture to Tristan und Isolde” as an encore following the regular program. This provoked angry outbursts and denunciations from some members of the audience, and heavy condemnation across the Israeli political spectrum in the following days.”
That would seem to be an opposite case to the one in the original post- wherein the cultural institution (the philharmonic orchestra) decided to play a piece that the audience did not like, over their objections.