California Faculty, Teachers, and Allied Labor Groups Unify in Opposition to California Senate Bill 520, an Attempt to Mandate Legislatively the Privatization of the Curriculum

This letter has been endorsed by the following faculty groups: the California Faculty Association, the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, the California Community College Independents, the California Federation of Teachers, the California Teachers Association, the California School Employees Association, the California Labor Federation, SEIU California, and USW 5810. April 18, 2013 The Honorable Darrell…

Footnote to the News (1): Missing Pieces in Mississippi

Anyone who doubts that history repeats itself has not been paying attention to the news this past week. If you recall, in 2001, as all attention seemed to be focused on the rubble of the World Trade Center towers, letters containing anthrax started showing up at the offices of newspapers and U.S. Senators. This week,…

Ideologies and Strategies

In my previous post, I quoted from a ThinkProgress blog post on a bill introduced in the Ohio legislature that would have defined comprehensive sex education as a “gateway sexual activity.” The bill was ultimately withdrawn after its proponents were forced by public ridicule to recognize that it was no longer passable. But as the…

Love as a Drug (or Why My Eating a Doughnut May Make Your Child More Sexually Active)

The following item recently appeared on the Think Progress blog: “Ohio lawmakers failed to advance an amendment to the state budget that would have prohibited sex ed classes from including any instruction of “gateway sexual activity” under penalty of a potential $5,000 fine. News of the provision sparked outrage earlier this week, particularly since banning any health materials that…

Right to Work, by the Numbers, Part 2

The Impact of Immigration In the first post in this series, I attempted to counter the claim that the population shift from the “Rust Belt” to the “Sun Belt” has reflected a preference for living in “right-to-work” rather than in “pro-labor” states. I can both summarize that argument and extend it by pointing out that…

Online Education in the Land of Oz

“If you follow the Yellow Brick Road, you’ll eventually reach the Emerald City, but once there, you’ll find, as Dorthy does, that the Wizard of Oz doesn’t have anything to offer but an illusionist’s cheap tricks. “Oz isn’t where we want to be. It’s where we end up when we don’t know where we want…

Giving Rush the Bum’s Rush

Over the last few weeks, the authors of several posts on this blog have sought to address recent outrageous assertions made by Rush Limbaugh. A little more than a year ago, I wrote the following post for Oxymoronic Nation, a personal, progressive blog that I started on Google. I was trying to place Limbaugh’s offensive…

Review of Embracing Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: Making Change to Support the New Faculty Majority.

Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 4 Kezar, Adrianna. Embracing Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: Making Change to Support the New Faculty Majority. New York: Routledge, 2012. A faculty member at the University of Southern California, Kezar has written several books on the issues currently confronting higher education. In Embracing Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, she…

Review of Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities.

Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3 Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012. This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of…

Right to Work, by the Numbers, Part 1

Part 1: Population and Population Movement People who are pro-labor often argue against right-to-work legislation by pointing out its fundamental unfairness to dues-paying union members and by arguing that, in weakening unions, it erodes the wages, benefits, and working conditions of all workers. I myself made such an argument in an earlier post to this…