Media outlets cannot be held accountable for every advertiser that buys space from them. For instance, very occasionally, Far-Right groups do advertise on MSNBC (though the ads always do leave me scratching my head over how they could possibly be worth the expense). But, given how political ideologies, corporate interests, advocacy on socio-economic and environmental…
Kudos to Montana Governor Steve Bullock who has vetoed legislation passed by Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature that would have permitted students to keep guns in their dorm rooms. Here are the lead paragraphs from the Huffington Post article: “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) vetoed a bill Monday that would have allowed guns on college…
On May 10, the New York Times’ daily news highlights included the following lead items: In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M. Scheme By Marc Santora The authorities said laptops and the Internet were used in more than two dozen countries to steal from A.T.M.’s, including 2,904 machines in New York City, in one…
Recently, I wrote a post titled “Suppress the vote, 2013-2014—on Campus” (https://academeblog.org/2013/04/28/suppress-the-vote-2013-2014-versions-on-campus/). In the post, I describe the efforts of the Republican majorities in the North Carolina and the Ohio legislature to create penalties that will effectively reduce the numbers of college students voting in both states. In North Carolina, parents will now lose the…
Employment in Manufacturing Today, only about 8.2% of U.S. workers are employed in manufacturing. Even before the Great Recession, manufacturing employment in the U.S. had been steadily declining, with a loss of approximately 4,000,000 jobs between 1998 and 2007, the decade preceding the recession. Another 1.6 million jobs in manufacturing were lost between 2008 and…
This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] Anyone who wants a job, it seems. According to a recent survey of employers by the Association of American Colleges and Universities reported in It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning…
Last week, I posted a piece on the Ohio state legislature’s oxymoronic proposal to preserve state park and forest land by licensing fracking operations on those lands. I expressed my concern that areas previously degraded by and still recovering from coal mining would be degraded again by fracking. A reader pointed out that the environmental…
This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] A bill was recently introduced in the Florida legislature that would bypass the established system of accreditation and allow local state officials to accredit MOOCs and other online courses, including those from unaccredited for-profit providers.…
Chris Christie and I probably do not have a great deal in common beyond the fact that we are both obese and sometimes unapologetically obnoxious, but when I read that he had “smushed” a spider during a visit to an elementary classroom, I immediately “heard” my wife saying to me, “Please use a paper towel…
Reading even just the headlines to these new stories in The Onion should put a smile on your face: Snooze Button Time Traveler Sets Coordinates for Five Minutes into the Future Nation’s Amateur Skateboarders Haven’t Landed Trick in 12 Years 17-Year Cicadas Horrified to Learn about 9/11 Man Creates Functional Gun on 3-D Printer Seedless…