Item 3 Marking the National Rifle Association’s 2015 Freedom Festival in Nashville Yesterday, the U.S. Capitol was locked down because a gunshot was fired immediately outside its walls. Initial reports indicated only that the gunman had been “neutralized” by a “self-inflicted fatal gunshot.” Putting aside the very odd language that authorities used to summarize…
Item 4 Marking the National Rifle Association’s 2015 Freedom Festival in Nashville Some truisms, even about guns, turn out to be true. In January 2013, a security guard in Trinidad and Tobago accidentally shot off his penis with an illegal gun. The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reported that the 33-year-old man was carrying a…
Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California system recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which she argued that, despite the challenges created by unprecedented cuts in state support for public higher education, it is a gross exaggeration to assert that American higher education is in crisis. Scott H. Levine,…
This past week, Bill O’Reilly cited, for the second time, statistics that supposedly show that more Whites than African-Americans are killed by police. Although he framed the discussion of these statistics by stating that he was in no way condoning the recent police shooting of an unarmed African-American man in North Charleston, South Carolina, he…
In discussing and charting the dramatic shift from state support to tuition as the major revenue source for public colleges and universities, we typically focus on national or state-by-state data. But we can also chart that data for individual institutions. For example, here is such a chart for Pennsylvania State University: The advantage of considering…
This is a carefully prepared, persuasive, and at times eloquent speech. It would have been nice if such speeches had been given more consistently at the beginning of the Obama presidency, instead of at the tail end of it, and if they had reflected a broader and louder political focus on protecting and promoting labor rights.…
Rudy Fichtenbaum has sent me the following statistical analysis in response to the assertions made by Campos in the article in the New York Times and as a follow-up to my own post on that article. I don’t think that anything that Rudy points out in this analysis substantially contradicts anything that I have asserted…
In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, Paul F. Campos has offered his opinion on “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much.” [The whole piece is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0] Campos argues that attributing the rise in tuition costs to reductions in state funding is a fairy tale that administrators have been…
Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass. New York: Knopf, 1937. Conrad Richter is best known for his Awakening Land trilogy about the settlement of the Ohio frontier: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950). But Richter’s earliest stories and novels were set on the later and very different frontier of the…