BY LAURA MARKWARDT Yesterday, Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s education secretary nominee, submitted written answers to questions from the Senate Education Committee. As in her hearing, she avoided substantially answering questions. Senator Patty Murray says that DeVos’s answers are lacking and has called for a postponement of today’s scheduled committee vote. Senator Al Franken confirmed last week…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is the opening of an article written by Jack Torry for the Columbus Dispatch: Sens. Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown objected to the government’s decision to prevent a Cleveland Clinic physician on a Sudanese passport from returning to the United States as part of President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the NBC News website, Phil Hessel reports on the responses of universities to President Trump’s executive order prohibiting those from certain Muslim countries from entering the U.S.: “At a practical level, we are advising community members and visiting scholars from the designated countries to suspend plans for international travel,”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On January 18, the New York Times published a piece by Scott Shane titled “From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece.” The piece might have been given the title of this post or “Anatomy of a Piece of Complete Fiction”–with an ironic tip of the hat to the novelist Robert…
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Seattle Times, Benjamin Woodard provides a timeline of events that occurred in the city on the day of Trump’s inauguration, events that culminated in the shooting of a man involved in a protest outside of a hall where Milo Yiannopolous was speaking. Perhaps it is simply a problem with…
Writing for the Hartford Courant, Sally Jenkins provides a very acerbically satiric, first-person response ostensibly from University of Connecticut football coach Randy Edsell to the furor now surrounding his decision to rescind a scholarship offer to a player recruited by his predecessor: “Over the course of my long and distinctively insincere career, which includes…
BY MARTHA T. McCLUSKEY This is a guest post by Martha T. McCluskey, a professor of law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar at the University of Buffalo. Her e-mail address is mcclusk@buffalo.edu. The views in this blog and related article do not represent any institution or group. As public funding for higher education has…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Robbins reports: “Los Angeles Valley College in Valley Glen said it paid $28,000 in bitcoins to the hackers, who had used malicious software to commandeer a variety of systems, including key computers and emails. “’It was the assessment of our outside cybersecurity experts that…
BY AARON BARLOW Questions of ‘intellectual property’—oh, how I hate that term—continue to plague us in this new digital age, and in ways never contemplated when patents and copyrights and trademarks and more were first protected by law in the English/American tradition three- and four-hundred years ago. We have built up assumptions of ‘ownership’ without…
BY JOHN K. WILSON CNN is reporting some very important news about talk show host Monica Crowley, Trump’s pick as senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council: she is a plagiarist. And this is not your garden-variety, “oops I copied a few things accidentally” excuse kind of plagiarism. This is massive, systematic, intentional…