POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are excerpts from two articles written by Becky Johnson for the Smoky Mountain News [http://www.smokymountainnews.com/], passed on to me by Connor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus: WCU Faculty Closely Monitoring $2 Million Koch Gift Faculty members have lauded administration for giving them a seat at the table. That wouldn’t happen…
BY MARTIN KICH An alternative title to this post might be “’Redefining The Takers.’” The New York Times has reported the possibility that Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for more than two decades because of a $913,000,000 loss reported in 1995. In response to the story, Trump has asserted that he…
BY PAUL-OLIVIER DEHAYE Guest blogger Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a former assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Zurich. Surveillance capitalism, described by Shoshana Zuboff, is the logic of accumulation of data leading to commodification of a facet of the global digital life. As remarked by Oliver Stone, Pokemon Go fits in this logic, as it…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an item from tonight’s CNN Reliable Sources: “No More ‘Ailes Newsroom’ “Breaking news from Athens, OH: ‘Roger Ailes‘ name will be removed from a WOUB newsroom, Ohio University President Roderick McDavis announced” this evening, per the student paper The Post. ‘McDavis gave no exact date for its removal, but the letters of Ailes’ name were…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the lead paragraphs from an article written by Susan Snyder for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Tweets by the chairman of Ursinus College’s board of trustees have drawn ire from some students and at least one fellow board member, who called them ‘elitist, racist, sexist, body-shaming,’ and ‘generally intolerant,’ and resigned…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item has been distributed by Loonwatch [http://www.loonwatch.com/], a website that tracks examples of Islamophobia and other expressions of Nativism, xenophobia, White nationalism, and hate-think: “The 2016 presidential election season has been punctuated by the implosion of the Republican party, decimated by the long nurtured hatred and xenophobia that it has…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Scott D. Miller, the President of Virginia Wesleyan University, has written a guest column for the Virginian-Pilot with the same title as this post. After providing an overview of what a university president’s summer routine typically involves, he writes: “Then there’s this summer — which to me is exceptionally hot, volatile,…
BY AARON BARLOW What’s the point of having academic credentials if you can’t use them? Sure, we make them into bludgeons inside the ivory tower, but that’s really just child’s play: the bludgeons do all the real damage of balloons. Only when there is ‘real-world’ application can they have an impact, do they really mean…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a background note written by Michael Barbaro and published on the progressive blog Crooks and Liars: “All the way back in June of 2015, this news was reported, although at the time many of us dismissed it because clearly we had no idea how insane this election would be,…
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…