Last year, as Christmas approached, I gathered some articles that seemed to suggest that we weren’t quite understanding concept of “holiday spirit.” Here are the headlines to those articles: “Six Toys That Could Make a Progressive’s Head Explode” “A Jolly Christmas, Retailers Count the Extra Days” “Americans Buying More Gifts for That Special Someone—Themselves” “Five…
Yesterday John K. Wilson wrote about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy mandating institutional oversight of the blog posts, tweets, and other public digital communications of faculty and staff at Kansas colleges and universities. Because it is not restricted to communications made with institutional resources, this policy goes well beyond violating of academic freedom,…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ As happens too often in higher education these days, the recent push to increase college completion rates shows how laudable goals can become problematic when pursued in narrow, rigid ways. Who wouldn’t want to increase the numbers of college…
At Wright State, we have “Garcetti language” in our contract, protecting criticism of the administration as an aspect of academic freedom. We don’t abuse this right, but if our administration endorsed the sort of policy just approved by the Kansas Board of Regents for the public universities across that state, we would lambaste them on…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis drew upon his prominence as the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature to issue a national warning against the dangers of fascism. Huey Long was emerging as a likely candidate in the 1936 presidential election, and in the satiric novel It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis provided an extended…
Here are some relatively recent headlines that I have collected: Former Al-Qaeda Barber Seized in Iraq American without Arab Roots Almosts Wins “Arabs Got Talent!” Andy Kauffman’s Brother Says He’s the Victim of a Hoax Biologists Use Cannons to Capture and Tag Endangered Birds Celebrating the Holidays behind Bars China to Send Pig Sperm to…
Recently, the New Statesman ran a short piece on a study that tracked the majors of millionaires by the baccalaureate and graduate degrees that they have completed [http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2013/10/top-ten-university-degrees-taken-millionaires]. The ten most popular degrees among this select group were reported as follows: 1. Engineering 2. MBA 3. Economics 4. Law 5. Business Administration
In August 2013, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones described the sinkhole at Bayou Corne as “the biggest ongoing disaster in the United State that you haven’t heard of.” That was already a year after the sinkhole had first appeared. Writing for the Daily Kos, Jen Hayden offered the following overview: “One night in August 2012,…