The dogs started in on it. I clicked off the computer screen and walked upstairs to answer the door. My wife was already on the stoop, talking to an earnest-looking couple. She had given them a dollar for a copy of The Militant, the small ‘paper associated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and was trying…
The new issue of Academe, which looks at the public policy landscape for higher ed, has just been posted online. The issue is guest-edited by Brian Turner, a professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and chair of the AAUP’s Government Relations Committee. Turner tells a story in his introduction to the issue which is…
Lindel Toups is a member of the Parish Council of LaFourche Parish, Louisiana. Under normal circumstances, his chances of coming to national media attention would seem extremely minimal. But Lindel Toups seems to have been very determined to beat those long odds. Toups has achieved his fifteen minutes of notoriety by pushing a ballot measure…
Between the typhoon that has devastated the Philippines and the outbreak of tornadoes that have devastated the Midwest, the media has presented us with pictures of terrible devastation on a scale that we have not seen since Hurricane Sandy. These first two photos are of the ruined landscape that Typhoon Haiyan left in its wake…
With all of the attention being paid to “Leftist” professors using class time, university e-mail, or even social media to “force their ideology” on their students, it is hard (for me, at least) to pass up the opportunity to cite Far-Right abuses of political expression on campus. The Young Conservatives of Texas, a student group…
The following piece was written by my former student and friend Mike Lamm. Mike is a reporter for the Decatur Daily Democrat. _________________________ A new study of gun violence in the United States, recently published in the American Journal of Public Health and conducted by researchers at Boston University, has established a convincing statistical connection…
In the late 1980s, 20th Century Fox distributed a teen romantic comedy called How I Got Into College. The movie followed the adventures of Marlon as he pursued the “girl of his dreams,” Jessica. Jessica hoped to attend a fictional Pennsylvania institution, Ramsey College, which advertised to prospective students that it sought “more than the…
Yesterday, the news channels were focused on very little beyond President Obama’s press conference, during which he repeatedly apologized for his administration’s “fumbling” of the rollout of the ACA website. Later in the day, he gave a speech in Ohio that, in all of its admittedly very partisan highlighting of his administration’s accomplishments, does serve…
Several weeks ago, Governor Kasich of Ohio received a great deal of national attention for going against the wishes of the GOP-dominated legislature and agreeing to accept Federal funding to expand Medicaid. In an interview with the New York Times, Kasich defended his position in remarkably progressive terms: “’I’m concerned about the fact there seems…
Is learning simply the acquisition of information? Is teaching nothing more than the successful transmission of “answers”? Seems so. Seems, also, that those who know next to nothing about education have so hijacked the discussion that we no longer are able to have nuanced discussions about its realities–the needs, methods and goals of systems producing…