The Insanity of "Campus Carry"

After a gunman opened fire last week at an Oregon community college, killing 9 and wounding 10, President Obama bemoaned the “routinization” of our response.  Oregon, it must be noted, is one of seven states that now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses.  Gun rights advocates like the NRA…

Power Rankings of Presidential Candidates

Each week during the NFL season, Business Insider publishes power rankings not just of the NFL teams but of the quarterbacks leading those teams. This fall, Business Insider has started publishing weekly power rankings of the presidential candidates, complete with the candidate’s polling averages nationally and in the earliest primary states, as well as an…

A History and Defense of Tenure

Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor at Tufts University, has been a professor of German, Judaic studies and biblical literature and is a former provost of Tufts.  In an article that first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine, and is now available on the web under the title “Tenure:…

Among School Children: A Review of Steven Salaita’s "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom"

This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…

Who Says That the Spirit of Invention Is Dead in America? Or, a Brief but Ultimately Horrifying Exercise in Not-So-Free Association Involving Pizza, Rats, and the Various Meanings of "Viral"

This photo was originally posted on Pinterest, and it has, as they say, gone viral: And if you happen to live in or are visiting a big city such as New York, this clever bit of American ingenuity may just keep the rats from dragging off your pizza slices when you’re not looking: Oh, and,…

Is Anybody Home?

Something has happened to the way I read scholarly articles.  Unless I can sense a person behind the words, I drift off. No more “objectivity” for me, thank you. Give me the same information, but let me know who is providing it, and why I should trust them. This is beginning to prove to be…

College Recruiting: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Last week, Inside Higher Education published its 2015 Survey of College and University Admission Directors. Planned to coincide with the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling held in San Diego, IHE drew responses from 264 admission directors, taken from a mix of public and private colleges and universities. The respondents replied…

Here At MFU

Here at Margaret Farmer University, we’ve an academic tradition going back fifty years, to our days as an agricultural college. Founded by the Farmer family, we are named after our first president, whose brother was the college’s first Chief Fiscal Officer. The older generation of the Farmer family, known affectionately as “Ma” and “Pa,” set…