There is almost no contemporary fiction that I could confidently describe as being universally inoffensive. I mean this without any snideness whatsoever, but I don’t know how English faculty at Christian colleges and universities manage to teach any courses in contemporary literature. I occasionally teach an interdisciplinary Honors seminar called “The Meanings of Rivers,” in…
I have recently posted an item on the controversy generated by the Department of Defense’s when it made available to its employees with Appalachian backgrounds a course on how to talk less obviously like hillbillies [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/31/do-you-speak-hillbilly-and-wish-that-you-didnt/]. And, even more recently, I have posted an item on the ways in which armed conflicts often involve battles…
The following paragraphs open a recent post on Dennis Baron’s site The Web of Language: “2014 marks the centennial of World War I, time to take a closer look at one of its offshoots, America’s little-known War on Language. “In April, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. In addition to sending troops to fight…
Diane Ravitch’s Blog includes two items of considerable interest on the topic of the computer grading of essays. In the first post, titled simply “Why Computers Should Not Grade Student Essays” [http://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/03/why-computers-should-not-grade-student-essays-2/], Ravitch chronicles the efforts to create software that can generate essays that the grading software will evaluate as excellent. Although the computer-generated essays…
World Net Daily, the main source of news for those who think that National Review and American Spectator suffer from a creeping liberal bias, reports the following on the latest appearance on Sean Hannity’s FOX News show by Phil Robertson, the scion of the Duck Dynasty clan: “Phil Robertson, who got himself suspended from the…
Writing for the Boston Globe, Oliver Ortega has reported on the Lynn, Massachusetts, school district’s decision to sever ties with Gordon College, a Christian institution that has placed student teachers in the district’s classrooms for more than a decade. The tension between the college’s and the school district’s positions on the employment rights of gay,…
In an e-mail sent today by UA Outreach, President Pat Gamble announced his request that the University of Alaska Board of Regents revisit the $320,000 bonus decision. The Board of Regents is planning to meet in executive session on September 8 to consider Gamble’s request, according to the news release. Thanks to all of you…
Richard Vedder, an emeritus economist at Ohio University, has recently released another study showing the benefits of “right to work” legislation. In a newspaper interview, he has predicted that Ohio will adopt “right to work” legislation in 2015. Vedder has, of course, long been on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute; so, despite his…
In late July, Kris Olds wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed’s Blog U: Global Higher Ed titled “Why No MOOCs on Gaza?” [The complete article is available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/why-no-moocs-gaza] Rightly recognizing that the MOOC format would be perfectly suited to providing succinct overviews of the conflicts in the world’s hotspots, Olds searched sites of…