The following chart is taken from a new report by the Pew Research Center, measuring public trust, by political ideology, in various media outlets. The takeaways from this survey are fairly obvious from the chart. On the whole, UK-based news sources are trusted by a broader range of Americans than U.S. news sources. Those who…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released its annual ranking of American colleges and universities. The ranking purport to reflect what students will learn at the institutions: specifically, whether they will be required to take core courses in composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics, and science. An article in the…
This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the…
The first of these stories, “Gun Activists Lobbhy for Weapons on Campus,” appeared in the Norman Transcript [http://www.normantranscript.com/news/article_52a58aa0-4b3d-11e4-89de-0f889f7b5efd.html]. Gun-rights activists are pushing for legislation that will allow guns to be brought onto the state’s 25 public college and university campuses. Don Spencer, Vice President of the state’s Second Amendment Association, is promoting the legislation in…
Doctorow, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. After his discharge from the army, E. L. Doctorow found a job as a script reader at Columbia Pictures. After reading a great many scripts for Westerns, he became convinced that he could write a more credible and still entertaining Western. He…
Rudy Fichtenbaum, President American Association of University Professors First I want to thank the University of Saskatchewan Faculty Association for inviting me to attend your Academic Freedom Event. I do not consider myself to be an expert on academic freedom. Thus, I am all the more so truly honored that you have asked me…
Here are the opening paragraphs of an article that appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe: “The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced Monday that it will review aspects of a campus police department program that uses students as confidential drug informants, after a disclosure that an informant for the university police died of a heroin overdose. “The…
In the mid-1990s, Pearson, which, to that point, had been a media conglomerate, set out to become the world’s largest publisher of textbooks. Within a decade, it bought up most of the most recognizable imprints—and most of those that it didn’t buy up have been bought up by its major competitor, McGraw-Hill. In the early…
John T. McNay, a professor of history at UC-Blue Ash, is president of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. The following op-ed appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer on September 28 and is available at: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/09/28/opinion-bloat-driving-uc-miami-costs/16410479/ We appreciate the column by David Hodge, president of Miami University, and Santa Ono, president…