During the 2011 fight to repeal Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, I began to write op-eds on the many aspects of that legislation that would have reduced collective bargaining rights for all public employees in the state and would have completely eliminated those rights for college and university faculty. Initially the goal was to place op-eds…
The following paragraphs are taken from an article that Jill Barshay contributed to the Hechinger Report on June 1: “A team of academic researchers found that one third of colleges and universities underestimated actual living expenses by more than $3,000. Another 11 percent of schools overestimated by more than $3,000. In other words, almost half…
Ball, John. In the Heat of the Night. New York: Harper, 1965. John Ball’s most memorable creation, the African-American police detective Virgil Tibbs, was the protagonist of six novels and five films, most of which were not based on Ball’s novels. In the Heat of the Night, the first novel to feature Tibbs, was an…
The rampant exploitation of contingent faculty—in particular, of part-time or adjunct faculty—is one of the more disgraceful developments in American higher education over the last quarter century. It ranks with the rampant abuses committed by online for-profit colleges and universities as one of the most pernicious effects of the corporatization of higher education—and, more broadly,…
Conservative pundit Bill Kristol tweets: “The Left’s 21st century agenda: expunging every trace of respect, recognition or acknowledgement of Americans who fought for the Confederacy.” Well, no. The ‘stars and bars’ controversy has nothing to do with heritage. Today, that flag is simply a symbol of segregation and racism. For a long time, it did…
If you have been following the controversy over the proposed Cohen-Tucker fellowship program the following announcement, issued today by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which brings the controversy to a positive end, will interest you. If you didn’t follow this story see my previous posts here, here, here and here.…
The headline of today’s op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin was wonderful: “Scott Walker’s test of academic freedom.” And the first half of the essay, tracing the development of the “Wisconsin Magna Carta” in defense of academic freedom, and the threat posed by Walker, is also wonderful. And…
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force,” Eric Johnson writes: This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force. Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload…
Jon Levine, writing for Mic, reported about a decision on where to go to college made by an incoming freshman, Ronald Nelson, last month. It’s a dilemma faced by countless high school seniors across America about this time each year. Mr. Nelson is an outstanding student at Houston High School in Memphis who has earned…
Today, the Academy of American Poets distributed the e. e. cummings poem “my father moved through dooms of love” as its poem-a-day daily e-mail. Here are the opening stanzas of this poem, which becomes more comprehensible, I think, as we ourselves age, as our fathers pass away, and as they are available to us only…