POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This week, I came across an Associated Press story by William Petroski about discussions to permit alcohol sales at the University of Iowa’s football games and other collegiate sports events throughout the state. It turns out that Iowa is hardly the first state to sidle up to the bar. A 2015…
BY MARTIN KICH Not all stories are big stories, but sometimes the small stories are illustrative in ways that bigger stories cannot be because as the scope of a story becomes narrower, the implications can be seen in a more personalized way. In the Music Department at Pacific Lutheran University, changes have been proposed that,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Elizabeth Campbell for Bloomberg News, titled “Illinois Colleges Besieged by Cuts as Budget Battle Trickles Down”: “For Illinois’s colleges and universities, the end of a record-long political fight over the budget isn’t bringing the financial consequences to a close. “Southern Illinois…
BY AARON BARLOW Over the past few years, I’ve become less and less enthusiastic about grants as a funding mechanism for higher-education-related projects. It’s not just the Koch brothers and their use of grants to promote particular ideologies but even the gentler tugs by funders such as the NEH toward consideration of particular arenas or inclusion…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The editors at the Detroit Free Press have published an editorial titled “Like a Sick Joke.” Here are the opening paragraphs: “In the wake of the Flint water crisis, amid profound concerns over an aging oil pipeline under the Great Lakes, with an ongoing, urgent need to decrease pollution and improve air quality and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This chart has been provided as part of an article by Emily Peck on the factors driving income inequality: In response to my posts on administrative bloat, I have sometimes received complaints that my emphasis on high administrative salaries is beside the point because relatively few upper administrators receive those salaries…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article sponsored jointly by ProPublica and the New York Times, Annie Waldman has reported the following: “New Jersey’s loans, which currently total $1.9 billion, are unlike those of any other government lending program for students in the country. They come with extraordinarily stringent rules that can easily lead to…
This is a letter written by George Mason sophomore Mark Hammond to the George Mason student newspaper, The Fourth Estate. For some reason, that newspaper never published it on its website; so he has given permission to Connor Gibson, a co-founder of the group Un-Koch My Campus, to disseminate it. _________________________ “Last fall, when…
The following letter was sent by Sherrod Brown to Secretary of Education John King. (I have omitted a half-dozen footnotes that cite the sources for the details that Senator Brown highlights.) The letter illustrates why Sherrod Brown is a very effective and widely respected progressive Senator in a “purple” state. _________________________ June 20, 2016…
My most recent post reports on the efforts at Eastern Michigan University to forestall the privatization of the institution’s dining services. In a post to the Miami University of Ohio chapter’s Facebook page, Cathy Wagner has provided not just a parallel example of this sort of privatization at that institution but a broader perspective on…