In academia, as elsewhere, there are all sorts of ostensibly significant distinctions between past achievements, current projects, and planning. The ubiquity of the planning is probably more than just as administrative obsession, more than just a salient illustration of the corporate influence on higher education. For one would be hard-pressed to find another arena of…
Much media attention has been paid to the strikes by fast-food workers, and most specifically McDonald’s employees, for higher wages. Those who are profiting from exploitative wages and who are enjoying the benefits of the ever-widening income gap have tried to minimize the public impact of these workers’ efforts to get a livable and fair…
It Might Be Coincidental to Your Hatred of Him That He Is Black. But All of the Following Expressions of Hatred of Him Are Clearly Racist—and If You Don’t Think So, You Are Either a Racist or the Word “Racist” Has Lost All Meaning The recent controversy surrounding the caricaturing of President Obama by a…
The following letter to the editor appeared in the Columbus Dispatch in response to an article that placed some of the blame for increases in tuition and in student debt on inflated faculty salaries and continuing salary increases. ______________ Sunday, August 4, 2013 As president of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University…
This announcement was distributed on our university’s faculty and staff listserves earlier today. I know that these seminars should probably make me feel more protected and secure, but they seem to provide, at best, a very odd and somehow unsettling note on which to begin the new academic year. I wonder if participants are expected…
On the heels of passing some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in the nation, the North Carolina legislature has just passed a revision of the state’s voting laws that, unarguably, makes it more difficult for many voters to exercise their right to vote. The new law requires photo-ID’s of all voters, regardless of whether…
What follows is the brief summary of a news story by Quinn Ford written originally for DNAinfo Chicago. The summary was published in HuffPost Chicago. xxxxxxx COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A Little Village gang member is being held on $20,000 bail after he admitted to police he was hiding a loaded gun in his…
This letter is a statement by the business community to articulate its broad support of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) [www.nextgenscience.org]. Such endorsements are essential in convincing legislators that science standards cannot be held hostage to extremist groups who have an antipathy toward science that is almost medieval—whose mistrust of science is rooted in…
At this time of the summer, when members of Congress return to their districts for town hall meetings often dominated by very vocal and very belligerent “Tea Party” activists, it is refreshing to see education officials in a conservative state resist pressures to make scientific standards conform to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Last week, the Kentucky…
One of the favorite rhetorical devices of those on the Far Right is to take a charge leveled against them by progressives, to co-opt the language used to articulate that charge, and then to reframe the debate with the co-opted language so that it seems that the logic of their position is not just credible…