POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At first glance, I thought that this might be a video of a lively discussion at this year’s annual meeting: As the video captioning makes clear, a debate about a massive infrastructure bill in the Taiwanese legislature degenerated into a partisan melee. I have checked several sources, and I have…
BY MARTIN KICH The Trump Administration’s “Made in America Week” is a cruel con on the working-class Americans who voted for him—and not just because almost all Trump, Inc., products continue to be produced by cheap foreign labor. It is an insult to the intelligence working-class Americans because it ignores the very obvious reality that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Update, July 14: Trinity Dean of Faculty Releases Report after Review of Recent Social Media Activity July 14, 2017 To the Trinity College Community, Freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression in pursuit of the truth are essential, not only to the health of the academy but also to…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following item appeared in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter for Monday, July 3, 2017: Kellyanne Conway appeared on “Fox & Friends” and was asked about the tweet Trump posted depicting himself metaphorically body slamming CNN. She retreated to a familiar White House talking point: the media is too focused on Trump’s tweets, not…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is the fifth section of the most recent higher education report produced by the Ohio Conference of AAUP. John McNay, the President of the Conference, and Sara Kilpatrick, the Executive Director of the Conference, deserves kudos for doing the bulk of the work on this report. The report…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Friday, June 2, 2017 To the WSU Board of Trustees, Interim President Curtis McCray, and incoming President Cheryl Schrader: We, the undersigned faculty, are writing to express our objection to the proposed FY18 budget announced on May 19. It calls for a $1.6 million increase in budgeted spending for intercollegiate…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Over the past two years, my university, Wright State, has been producing negative news stories with remarkable regularity. Our enrollment, which had been gradually increasing has dipped somewhat, and because we are in the midst of a largely self-created budget mess, any decline in enrollment makes the budget issues worse…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Much has been written about “fake news,” about the political ramifications of charging that something is “fake news,” and about the broader undermining of the public confidence in the credibility of the news media. Moreover, in the seemingly endless discussion of certain news stories and with the proliferation of social…