Interview with Seth Rosenfeld

Investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld’s 2012 book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power draws on thirty years of research and three hundred thousand pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to tell the story of the FBI’s covert operations in Berkeley during the 1960s. Focusing on…

My Favorite Commencement Address, Ever

Although this year’s commencement addresses by President and Mrs. Obama have been inspiring, engaging, and often humorous—as was Jon Lovett’s, my favorite commencement address, hands down, is one written by Robert Reich to last year’s graduates–but never meant to be delivered in person. It has been reproduced on a fairly large number of progressive blogs,…

Building Bridges: Connecting Pathways To Lead Somewhere

On May 23, the Century Foundation Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal released an important new study describing how best to strengthen community colleges to achieve socioeconomic mobility for more Americans. Led by co-chairs Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library and former president of Amherst College,…

Transcript of Jon Lovett’s Commencement Address at Pitzer College

Jon Lovett, a speechwriter for President Obama, addressed the graduates of Pitzer College on “fighting the culture of bullshit.” What follows is a brief selection from a fuller partial transcript of his commencement address provided through The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/life-lessons-in-fightingthe-culture-of-bullshit/276030/. ************************* One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning it.…

A Rhetoric of Demonization and Exclusion, Addendum

In an earlier post, “A Rhetoric of Demonization and Exclusion”  [https://academeblog.org/2013/05/23/a-rhetoric-of-demonization-and-exclusion/], I discussed the lunatic-fringe rhetoric of the GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Bishop D.W. Jackson. That post included a re-post of a post to Right-Wing Watch, which drew on public pronouncements by Jackson that have been reported in the print media or…

Teachers and Students: Machines and their Products?

It startles me each time I hear another person (usually, but not always, a non-educator) adamantly claim that education can successfully follow the same patterns of automation as industry or that it can be structured identically to business. This is nonsense. To be blunt (and has been pointed out for years–to unresponsive ears), it arises…

Perhaps Some Good News for Anthony Weiner

Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman whose unfortunate last name made his digital sharing of suggestive photos of himself seem at least as ridiculous as it was tawdry, has entered the Democratic primary to be elected mayor of New York. Immediately, he has moved into second place in the polls, though with just fifteen…