BY AARON BARLOW Somewhere around 1970, I walked by a wall on a college campus that had been plastered with a huge poster of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Below, someone had splashed the words “loco parentis.” That was exactly how we students felt in those days about college and university power over our lives. Then, it…
BY AARON BARLOW Anyone who teaches at a community college, an urban state university or almost anywhere outside of the top research institutions has run across it: We are not the equals of the scholars at Harvard, the University of Chicago and others of their ilk. Nor are we quite the teachers they are; our…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On its website, PEN America has published an item on writers and artists detained and interrogated as a result of the Trump administration’s travel ban. The article includes the following anecdotes, the second of which involves a distinguished historian invited to speak at Texas A&M University: “The bestselling children’s book author Mem Fox,…
BY STEVE MUMME This guest post is by Steve Mumme of the Colorado Conference. Knowledgeable observers of the higher education landscape will have noticed the dilemma that university presidents now suffer in the face of the Trump administration’s recent executive orders banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The U.S. President’s discriminatory hard line on…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Guest blogger Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is past president of the Modern Language Association. He first published this post on his Facebook page; it is reposted here with his kind…
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BY AARON BARLOW Charles Murray is a complicated figure. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), he married into a wealthy Thai family and spent time in the countryside as a PCV there during the 1960s. That type of experience, as any RPCV can tell you (as I can tell you), is formative. Immersion into another…
BY AARON BARLOW Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts to my journalism students the other day, I concentrated on this passage: The vituperative quality of the opposition press began to worry even the Federalists more and more, especially President Adams (even though the Federalist press was doing pretty much the same thing). A touchy and…
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Detroit News, Michael Gerstein reports: A northern Michigan Republican Party official resigned on Wednesday after landing in hot water for implying in a tweet that university protesters in California should be stopped violently. Dan Adamini, the Marquette County Republican Party secretary, apologized for his tweet. It made national news…
BY AARON BARLOW When I was young, Civics was a part of the web of education up to the college level. Everyone, after all, was expected to finish high school—and everyone was expected to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the structures of the political system of the United States and the responsibilities of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH We are getting used to seeing this sort of thing in states in which, largely because of gerrymandering, the GOP control of state government is all out of proportion to their actual share of voters. But, what is significant about this story, reported in the Daily Kos Elections: Voting Rights Roundup…