2013 Was a Banner Year for the Mole Rat

Largely lost among the succession of well-known awards for film, television, and literature was Science magazine’s annual award for Vertebrate of the Year. Pope Francis may have been Time’s consensus pick as Person of the Year for 2013, but the naked mole rat ran away—so to speak–with the Vertebrate of the Year Award. The naked…

College Sports and the Student Athlete

Last week  Peter Sung Ohr, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago, ruled that football players at Northwestern University could unionize. In issuing the ruling, Ohr found that the players were employees of the university. The ruling sent shock waves reverberating through American higher education since no one expected this outcome.…

Small Liberal Arts Colleges and the STEM Pipeline

Last week, The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) released a report on the contribution of small and mid-sized private, non-profit colleges to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) pipeline. The report is a component of a more encompassing public information campaign, Securing America’s Future: The Power of Liberal Arts Education. The report addressed four…

Cops and Robbers at the University of Southern Maine

This guest post was written by Michael DeCesare, Chair of the Department of Sociology at Merrimack College and President of the AAUP Chapter there. At a special meeting of the University of Southern Maine (USM) faculty senate on March 14th, USM President Theodora Kalikow announced her plan to eliminate four academic programs and lay off…

Three Years Ago, Senate Bill 5 Was Signed into Law in Ohio

This is a post by John McNay, President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP and the author of Collective Bargaining and The Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) [http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Bargaining-Battle-Ohio-Struggle/dp/1137339179/ref=la_B001KI3NOG_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396230324&sr=1-1]. _________________________ Three years ago, on March 31, 2011, the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature passed…

200 Princeton Professors Denounce Bestselling Author’s “Blame the Victim” Mentality on Sexual Assault

Susan Patton, author of Marry Smart, Finding the One, is an alumna of Princeton and was recently interviewed in the Daily Princetonian. The following exchange in that interview has provoked outrage: “Daily Princetonian: You wrote: ‘Please spare me your “blaming the victim” outrage,’ saying that a provocatively dressed drunk woman ‘must bear accountability for what…

The Best Thing That I Have Read Yet on True Detective

Writing for The Conversation, a terrific publication based in Australia, Rodney Taveira has written a wonderfully insightful article on the HBO series True Detective. The article is titled “True Detective Lassos the Yellow King in Hollywood South,” and it approaches the series in multiple, very nuanced ways. Taveira, a lecturer in American Studies at the…