For Presidents Day, See if You Can Identify the President Who Made Each of the Following Observations

Business Insider found an inspiring quotation from each of the presidents. The full item from Business Insider is available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/best-inspirational-quotes-from-us-presidents-2015-2 You will probably be surprised by how often the presidents have emphasized the value of persistence. I have turned that item in Business Insider into a quiz. The answers will be in the next…

Presidents Day Quiz: The Answers

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX James Buchanan Grover Cleveland Martin Van Buren Abraham Lincoln Warren G. Harding Millard Fillmore George Washington James Garfield William Howard Taft Rutherford B. Hayes Chester A. Arthur Andrew Johnson William Henry Harrison Harry S. Truman Benjamin Harrison…

More Budgetary Hijinks from Bobby Jindal

I have been chronicling the ever-increasing state budget deficit in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal’s ideologically doctrinaire and ineffectual attempts to find a solution to that deficit that does not involve raising any taxes, and the catastrophic impact that this situation will almost certainly have on Lousiana’s public colleges and universities. This past week Jindal floated another…

Two Weird Higher-Ed Items from the Far Right

The First Item: David Brat who came to national prominence by defeating Eric Cantor in the GOP primary in 2014, despite being outspent by Cantor by a 40-1 margin. For the 18 years before that election, Brat had been a professor of economics at Randolph Macon College, for three years heading the college’s Moral Foundations…

A Tribute to David Carr

Two days ago, on February 12, New York Times media columnist David Carr died suddenly while at work in the newspaper’s offices. His death received more national attention than it might otherwise have received because it occurred in a week when longtime CBS News journalist Bob Simon died in a car wreck in Manhattan, when…

Major Attack on Public-Employee Unions in Illinois

The recently inaugurated Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, has signed an executive order banning public-employee unions from collecting fair-share contributions from those employees who choose not to belong to the unions that represent them. I very recently did a post on the very skewed logic behind “right to work” legislation—see https://academeblog.org/2015/02/07/right-to-work-provides-workers-with-many-rights/ Rauner, previously the…

The Triple-Murders in Chapel Hill

The terrible murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, seemed, initially and superficially, an all-too mundanely tragic event: a long-festering dispute over parking spaces led a guy to kill his neighbors with a gun. On the surface, the only unusual detail seemed to be that the guy had killed three people. Usually…

Three Science Stories Strangely Told

All of these items have been distributed by Business Insider. Let’s start with a story about the unsuccessful attempt by SpaceX to land a rocket on an platform in the ocean [www.businessinsider.sg/spacex-rocket-crash-landing-vine-images-2015-2/]. Here is a photo of the crash: And here is the opening line of the article that immediately follows the photo: “SpaceX launched…

More on President Obama’s Proposal to Provide “Free” Community College

Two recent posts to Diane Ravitch’s blog have provided links to responses to President Obama’s proposal to provide free community college. The first item is “The Trojan Horse of ‘Free’ Community College,” an op-ed published at Truthout [http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28637-the-trojan-horse-of-free-community-college#]. It is written by Adam Bessie, a faculty member at a California community college whose personal blog…