"Effing Geniuses"
And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God. John Collins Bossidy’s old saw kept running through my mind as I read Thomas Frank’s “All These Effing Geniuses: Ezra Klein, Expert-Driven Journalism, and the Phony Washington Consensus” on…
Ethics and UIUC Board Chair Kennedy
On January 23, 2014, Christopher G. Kennedy was reelected by his peers as chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. In the public relations announcement it praised his putative transformation of the board into an ethical model of leadership: “During his five years as chairman, the board has restored confidence in the…
FSMers Respond to "Civility" Appeal
Yesterday I posted a statement by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), issued in response to a September 5 message to the UC Berkeley campus from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks that called “civility” and free speech “two sides of a single coin.” Also yesterday Dirks sent an email message to faculty, staff and…
CUCFA Statement on "Civility" and Academic Freedom
The following is the text of a statement issued on September 11 by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA): On Friday Sept. 5, Chancellor Dirks of UC Berkeley circulated an open statement to his campus community that sought to define the limits of appropriate debate at Berkeley. Issued as the campus approaches…
Not All Money is Good Money
The following is the text of an open letter to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees from Safiya Umoja Noble, Assistant Professor, UCLA, and former faculty member, student, and development staff member at UIUC. The letter appeared on Noble’s blog. Dear University of Illinois Board of Trustees Members, I spent the last eight years…
And Now There's a Blacklist?
Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous…
You Can’t Get Off the Ballot in Kansas
Chad Taylor, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in Kansas currently held by the long-serving but vulnerable Republican Senator Pat Roberts, recently announced that he was withdrawing from the race. The move was widely seen as an attempt to improve the chances of the Independent candidate Greg Orman, who was consistently finishing ahead of…
America Re-Imagined, in Retrospect: Fifty Notable American Novels about the “West”: 1-2
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964. Thomas Berger had such a long and productive career that it is a mystery why he is not routinely included in discussions of the great American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the highlights of his career was the critical…
More “Innovation” from Mitch Daniels
Over the last several weeks, Purdue University has announced that its School of Communications and its College of Technology have received $500,000 grants from President Mitch Daniels for creating, respectively, a three-year baccalaureate program and a competency-based program. In the media coverage, there has been a great deal of positive spin on the possibilities opened…