My morfar (grandfather on my mother’s side) hunted alligators by a lake in Småland. If this sounds strange to you, imagine how my mother must have felt when as a child in the 1940’s in Sweden she read Pelle Svanslös i Amerika. Or for that matter, how strange and incredulous a journey to America Gösta…
The following is the text of remarks as prepared for delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Morgan State University commencement ceremony in Baltimore on Saturday, May 17, 2014. The transcript was provided by the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs. _________________________ Thank you, President [David] Wilson, for those kind words-–and thank you all…
On May 16-18, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education’s 7th National Gathering drew nearly 100 faculty, student and organizational leaders to the Desmond Hotel in Albany, New York, where the organization held panel discussions and workshops surrounding a theme of “Building Alliances for Access, Equity and Quality.” The increasing problem of student debt was…
In the current frenzy of cost-cutting and budget slashing, many administrators are quick to blame what they determine are “less valuable” programs like the humanities and social sciences and cut funding to those programs accordingly—witness the governor of Florida recently saying that the state didn’t really need more anthropologists, anyway. Similarly, North Carolina governor Pat…
The following thread comes from Appalnet, the Appalachian Studies listserv (slightly edited), May, 2014: Colleagues, if you read the following on your institutional discussion board in reference to a complaint about a barefoot student, how would you respond to the professor? “My approach would be to assure this student that going barefoot is not against…
In his new book, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux writes that, “as public intellectuals, academics can do more.” We know that, of course, but it never hurts to hear it again, especially as the crisis in American education–and, following necessarily, in American society–grows. But what does it mean to be a public intellectual? What, in other…
In contemporary America, income inequality is indisputably increasing and indisputably limiting the potential and the upward mobility of the ever-increasing percentage of Americans slipping into the have-not category. In the absence of significant upward pressure on wages exerted by the large industrial unions and in the absence of a large industrial workforce because of the…
No matter the measure you use–education, income, heritage, race, family size, job type, language–Americans are moving to greater segregation than we have ever before experienced. This is a no-brainer; it has been the pattern for decades, and it becomes more dominant each year. We must be satisfied with it, for we are doing nothing, absolutely…