I have always been a trivia buff. This interest has had some professional usefulness. For almost a decade, I have written the questions for the annual middle-school and high-school scholastic bowls held at our campus. I wish that I could also say that some bit of trivia has inspired a scholarly article, even one that…
The Illinois State Senate’s Democratic Caucus has released a report on administrative bloat in the state’s colleges and universities. Although much of the focus is on executive compensation and expensive perks, there are many acknowledgements that the issues with executive compensation are indicative of proportionately high compensation throughout the administrative hierarchies of our institutions and…
Tidyman, Ernest. High Plains Drifter. New York: Bantam, 1973. An award-winning screenwriter, Ernest Tidyman won an Academy Award, and Edgar Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay of The French Connection. He also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the series of novels that he wrote about the…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
This is what Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley said on the Senate floor on the proposed TransPacific Partnership: “We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages, and think about the difference between running an operation in Malaysia or Mexico, with a…
The Conversation is an Australian website that seeks to synthesize academic and journalistic inquiry in order to provide very thoughtful commentary of Australian and international issues. Its mission statement includes the following principles: to inform public debate with knowledge-based journalism that is responsible, ethical and supported by evidence; to unlock the knowledge of researchers and academics to…
In a recent post to her blog, Diane Ravitch has reported on the ongoing effort to unionize the teachers in Detroit’s charter schools. At five of those schools, the AFT has held successful unionization campaigns. But when they attempted to organize the teachers at the seven University Prep Schools managed by Detroit 90/90, the school…
A recent, relatively short article by Joshua Bolkan published in Campus Technology broadly describes a new initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder: “The University of Colorado Boulder has gone public with its recent adoption of an open access policy. “As a result of the new policy, the university will have ‘nonexclusive, worldwide license to the…
This week, University World News includes two items on climate-change research. The first is a summary of a news article that appeared in Science: “The Australian government’s controversial move to host a think tank headed by noted global warming sceptic Bjørn Lomborg has unraveled-–for now. But Australia’s education minister has vowed to find a new…