Although today is April Fool’s Day, these are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories: 70,000+ Rolls of Toilet Paper Arrive for Detroit Firefighters A Bush-League President [Headline of an Article Critical of President Obama] A Mountain Lion…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 2 Altbach, Philip G., Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl, eds. American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges. 3rd Edition. Eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2011. In selecting the essays included in this collection, the editors…
Control freaks have lost control of their urge to control. Today, cockroaches, as well as people, can be found in cities of more than 50,000, as well as in open cereal boxes. Before they developed a vaccine, many people were stricken with polo. If one looks at available statistics, it is obvious why birth control…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education: No. 1 Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford U P, 2011. Ginsberg’s book has very quickly become a seminal work in the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to higher education’s…
The greatest irony in the increasing privatization of public education is that the deficiencies that the “reformers” typically claim to be trying to correct are often exacerbated by the very “reforms” that they are advocating. There is now a tremendous amount of statistical evidence that, on average, students in charter schools perform worse–and often much…
Debe Terhar, the President of the Ohio Board of Education, has sparked controversy by posting a picture of Adolph Hitler on her Facebook page alongside a text expressing opposition to President Obama’s gun-control proposals. Worse, when asked to explain the juxtaposition of the two items, Terhar offered the following disclaimer: “I did not compare our…
I live in a largely rural and very Republican region of Ohio. Somewhat regularly, letters to the editor that make my very progressive wife shriek are published in our daily newspaper. She usually reads them to me out loud and then suggests, for the umpteenth time, that I should write a reply so that anyone…
The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education calls on America’s college & university faculty to join in the search for new ways to fund higher education. In the United States, quality public higher education was once accessible to most Americans able to benefit from it. The way it worked was simple—taxpayers funded public colleges and universities…
A website called foreclosure.com is sponsoring an essay contest for current undergraduates in America’s colleges and universities. The contest was introduced in 2009. First prize is $5,000, and there are four runners-up prizes of $1,000. The students must write an 800- to 2,000-word essay on an assigned topic, and this year’s topic is the following:
In 2010, Republicans won the governorships and control of the legislatures in states across the Rust Belt. Because it was a census year, the GOP engaged in extreme gerrymandering that, at least at first glance, seemingly insured their control of those states for at least the next decade. In a previous post, I suggested that…