Roar Magazine: Beyond Education

Essay by Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making

On June 13, 2016, Corey Menafee decided the window had to go. During his work break, the thirty-eight-year-old African-American service worker at Yale University’s Calhoun College dining hall used a broomstick to smash a stained-glass window that depicted enslaved people of African descent. The building was named after the slaveholder and colonialist John C. Calhoun.

After he was arrested and charged with a felony, Menafee resigned from Yale and gave several interviews with local and national news outlets. The nationwide outcry against Yale pressured them to drop the charges and to rehire him. But they did so only on the condition of a gag provision, preventing Menafee from making any further statements to the public about his action and the administrative response.

 

Read the whole essay.