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prorogers.bsky.social
Melvin Rogers
@prorogers.bsky.social
6.8K followers 1.3K following 110 posts
Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor
Political Science Department @ Brown University
Teaches Political Theory
Book: The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (PUP)
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prorogers.bsky.social
Melvin Rogers @prorogers.bsky.social · Dec 19
Hello, New Followers. I am a political theorist at Brown University. I'm often thinking, writing, or reading about the ethical basis of democracy. Quotes from my favorite thinkers reflect my concerns. I will often post books or articles I'm reading. Thanks for being in community with me. 😀
prorogers.bsky.social
So satisfying to read these three together. There is a rich conversation taking place. 😀
November 17, 2025 at 2:54 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
So proud to work on this book series with Christia Mercer: Oxford New Histories of Philosophy. @esglaude.bsky.social @nneka.bsky.social
November 16, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
esglaude.bsky.social
So excited to have this book on my hands. Thanks to @prorogers.bsky.social and Christia Mercer and their wonderful work editing the Oxford Nee Histories of Philosophy series. We also have another volume of his writings on the way!
November 11, 2025 at 11:44 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
derekgottliebphd.com
@prorogers.bsky.social on James Baldwin making a similar point:
Similar to Wells’s use of “barbaric,” he does not deploy the term as determinative of who and what white Americans are fated to be. This is why, as he says, it is a terrible indictment because he thinks (and we ought not to think otherwise) his listeners can recognize the offense his claim represents—the offense to their character and way of being in the world. He demands that citizens be discursively agile—that they see the figurative use of the language as getting as close as possible to a terrible transformation of the self. What makes it a terrible indictment in another sense is the implication: many white Americans have shut off in themselves that part of them that responds to the pain of others, in particular civic others. To be a moral monster is to betray, we might say, the demand of thick relationships that define our shared political lives. This is the price of innocence and what makes it a crime.
October 29, 2025 at 1:23 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
Get it!!!
princetonupress.bsky.social Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · Oct 22
Save 70% on @prorogers.bsky.social's The Darkened Light of Faith, an ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined #democracy, through 10/31:

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

*Offer applies to orders shipping within the US, Canada, Latin America, Asia, & Australia.
The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought by Melvin L. Rogers
October 22, 2025 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
jbenmenachem.com
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero
Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...
www.thecrimson.com
October 21, 2025 at 5:11 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
Was asked about “viewpoint diversity.” It may sound like pluralism, but it means auditing faculty for ideological balance—confusing scholarship with partisan accounting. Pluralism rests on rigorous debate and critique, not political mandates, and rarely welcomes every opinion under the sun.
September 28, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
bonniehonig.bsky.social
My contribution to this is to say as often as possible “nothing worth studying at a university level has (only) two sides”
jonmladd.bsky.social Jonathan Ladd @jonmladd.bsky.social · Sep 26
Inviting pundits to give "talks" is just not what professors/departments do. Some schools have "institutes of politics" that do this, like @gupolitics.bsky.social at Georgetown, which invites conservatives regularly. Departments invite scholars for talks, and I rarely know their personal politics.
jdcmedlock.bsky.social James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · Sep 26
More than anything, they want to be patted on the head and told they're a good boy by the liberal elites
September 27, 2025 at 12:42 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
What I'm working on these days.
August 18, 2025 at 4:23 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
This is now out. I love working on this series.
paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com · Jul 9
This is of interest to me! Hat tip to @prorogers.bsky.social.
Book cover for Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Republicanism, by Philip Yaure. Cover is black and includes a portrait of Douglass. Back cover for Seizing Citizenship, Oxford University Press. "In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass maintained that enslaved Black Americans were already American citizens. Through a systematic analysis of his political writings from the 1840s through the 1890s, Philip Yaure shows that Douglass' declaration of Black Americans' citizenship is the locus of a profound innovation in republican political philosophy. Seizing Citizenship argues that Frederick Douglass reimagined the republican concept of citizenship, on which persons are citizens because they contribute to the polity, to cast the everyday resistance of Black Americans against slavery and white supremacy as activity that constitutes them as American citizens. The resistance of Black Americans forged them into a people with the collective power to remake America's civic ethos in a racially just and inclusive fashion. Douglass advanced an abolitionist republicanism, on which persons seize standing as free citizens of a free polity through the struggle to dismantle the oppressive institutions that dominate and exploit them. Douglass's republican politics strives not to overcome our vulnerability to one another, but instead to deepen such vulnerability on terms conducive to our shared emancipation and collective flourishing."
July 10, 2025 at 12:18 AM
prorogers.bsky.social
"If you campaign to move university faculty to the right in the name of institutional pluralism, why not—with the same vociferousness—call for greater economic and ideological diversity among university trustees, university presidents, corporate boardrooms...?"
www.commondreams.org/opinion/univ...
What Must Universities Become Today in Face of Trump? | Common Dreams
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
www.commondreams.org
June 11, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
verena-erlenbusch.bsky.social
Two new book reviews are out in Political Theory:
Nick Brommell reviews The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought, by @prorogers.bsky.social
Book Review: The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and African American Political Thought, by Melvin L. Rogers - Nick Bromell, 2025
journals.sagepub.com
May 18, 2025 at 7:23 AM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
princetonaudio.bsky.social
@prorogers.bsky.social's The Darkened Light of Faith is a powerful new account of what a group of 19th- and 20th-century African American activists, intellectuals, and artists can teach us about democracy.

🎧📘 Save 50% on this #audiobook with code BLOOM50: press.princeton.edu/books/audio/...
May 7, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
brendannyhan.bsky.social
"the prospect of successful opposition to authoritarianism lies primarily in civil society. Many more businesses, law firms, and media organizations will need to step up in opposition, together with many more colleges." www.chronicle.com/article/we-h...
April 23, 2025 at 1:30 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
I am late in seeing this!!
April 21, 2025 at 10:21 AM
prorogers.bsky.social
When things seem dark, I say paint. It will put a smile on your face. Here are some of my pieces. Enjoy 😀
April 8, 2025 at 1:05 AM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
derekgottliebphd.com
Reminded of @prorogers.bsky.social on Baldwin:
he calls moral monsters. Similar to Wells’s use of “barbaric,” he does not deploy the term as determinative of who and what white Americans are fated to be. This is why, as he says, it is a terrible indictment because he thinks (and we ought not to think otherwise) his listeners can recognize the offense his claim represents—the offense to their character and way of being in the world. He demands that citizens be discursively agile—that they see the figurative use of the language as getting as close as possible to a terrible transformation of the self. What makes it a terrible indictment in another sense is the implication: many white Americans have shut off in themselves that part of them that responds to the pain of others, in particular civic others. To be a moral monster is to betray, we might say, the demand of thick relationships that define our shared political lives. This is the price of innocence and what makes it a crime.
April 5, 2025 at 10:10 AM
prorogers.bsky.social
"Objections brought against liberalism ignore that the only alternatives to dependence upon intelligence are either drift and casual improvisation, or the use of coercive force stimulated by unintelligent emotion and fanatical dogmatism--the latter being intolerant by its very constitution." J.Dewey
March 31, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com
Freedom isn't a passive inheritance, but a struggle to live responsibly with one another. That is hard work when it seems to be our inescapable nature to construct myths and ideologies of inequality and exclusion.

I love this essay on Baldwin by @prorogers.bsky.social.
Existential Liberalism: James Baldwin and the Problem of Freedom
The burden of freedom has always been heavy, and Baldwin forces us to confront whether we are willing to bear it.
www.liberalcurrents.com
March 27, 2025 at 3:18 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
James Baldwin is a figure many of us have turned to in recent years. I am no exception. In my latest piece for @liberalcurrents.com I offer my thoughts on what Baldwin offers us and why we ought to heed his words. Have a read and let me know what you think.
March 27, 2025 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
chrislhayes.bsky.social
Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.
paleofuture.bsky.social Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · Mar 26
Video of the international student at Tufts being arrested by "federal authorities" in Massachusetts has been released and it's terrifying.

They're not even uniformed officers. Just secret police thugs in hoodies and masks.

From WCVB: youtu.be/PuFIs7OkzYY
March 26, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
Excellent excellent excellent from Princeton president and constitutional/ political theorist Chris Eisgruber. There's been far too little of this kind of thing; here's hoping others follow his good example.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia
American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.
www.theatlantic.com
March 19, 2025 at 1:04 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
Leadership!

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia
American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.
www.theatlantic.com
March 19, 2025 at 12:57 PM
Reposted by Melvin Rogers
adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com
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Liberal Currents offers discussion, elucidation, and defense of liberal principles and institutions.
www.liberalcurrents.com
February 26, 2025 at 6:31 PM
prorogers.bsky.social
I enjoyed this conversation a few weeks back with Timothy McCarty at the University of San Diego.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkh...
A Public Conversation about Race, Democracy and the Darkened Light of Faith
YouTube video by USDHumanitiesCenter
www.youtube.com
March 17, 2025 at 11:24 PM