Hat tip: FrontPage Magazine
This piece from David Burge at IowaHawk Blog is a great read. A taste:
Two years ago [in March], Alan Lowenstein, associate professor of philosophy at Harvard University, came to a fateful conclusion. “I suddenly realized that the oppression of western technology extended to my own life,” he explained. “That’s when I got rid of my computer, threw away my Brooks Brothers suits, changed my name to Grok and moved into a cave.” …
“It was at the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago in ’97,” he explains. “I was chairing a session on the link between Malibu Barbie dolls and the Guatemalan counterinsurgency movement. Then it occurred to me… here we were, complaining about western science and culture, using animated Power Point slide presentations. At the Four Seasons, no less. It was just a tad hypocritical.” …
Duke University english professor Mognuk, formerly known as Phillip Turner, tries to bring his own commitment to non-western thought directly into the classroom – or in his case, classcave. Instead of using the department Xerox machine to print syllabi and exams, Mognuk painstakingly copies each, by hand, onto tree bark using frog blood for ink. The process is made more difficult by the lack of daylight before spring semester.