The discussion of the “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas, and elsewhere has been seriously skewed by a failure to look very much, if at all, beyond the specific examples offered to justify the laws. This issue is not really about Christian fundamentalist florists or restaurant owners having to provide services to gay couples who…
The Progressive news site Nation of Change has today run an article titled “Four Charts with What Everyone Should Know about the Student Debt Crisis.” The full article is available at: http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/04/04/four-charts-with-what-everyone-should-know-about-the-student-debt-crisis/ I think that the most telling of the charts may be this one, which shows the incredible increase in government-backed student debt: The…
A colleague sent me a link to the following post at Fighting against Casualisation in Education, a UK site promoting activism among contingent faculty. The actual post appears to be taken largely from the site of the University of Warwick. I am assuming that most of you, like me, will have little or no familiarity…
This past week the Oregon legislature passed and the governor of that state signed legislation that would automatically register to vote every citizen with a driver’s license issued by the state. I was going to write a post contrasting that law with a late amendment to Ohio’s transportation bill that would have required people from…
The following item, which appeared in the Ohio Conference’s weekly communications to our members, highlights the value of getting “our” message out and not relying on our institutions and our administrations to be the only spokespersons on higher-ed-related legislation. By the way, in typing the title of this post, I just realized that we routinely…
The following letter was published in the Toledo Blade this past week. It was written in response to a seemingly well intentioned and fairly thoughtful op-ed on the increasing tuition and fees being paid students and their families, which unfortunately suggested that faculty compensation and the leverage provided by unionization were among the main culprits:…
But that is the fault of neither the poets nor their poems. (Except perhaps for one or two poems about delicious meals.) Truth be told, I would probably have gotten fat even if I were illiterate. Probably fatter. Poems are high-calorie brain food, but they so fire the mind that the calories burn off as…
Here at WordPress.com, we‘re always looking for ways to improve the blogging experience. We pride ourselves on taking your suggestions to heart and work tirelessly to create better tools for you. Today, we’re releasing a game changer. As WordPress.com becomes easier to use, one piece of unanswered feedback keeps nagging at us: blogging is hard!…
Aaron Barlow’s post today concerns legislation proposed in North Carolina that will uniformly increase teaching loads at all public universities to four courses per semester. I might look at this kind of legislation somewhat differently if the Far Right was interested in funding public higher education at any reasonable level and some legislators were, in…