Remembering Julian Bond

The following article was disseminated by the Campaign for America’s Future in its Progressive Breakfast daily newsletter. A link to a companion article is provided at the end of this post. The article is reprinted here with the permission of Roger Hickey who, with Robert Borsage, co-directs this progressive center and effort. Its website is…

John Hess: Teacher and Faculty Leader

This morning word came via AAUP Contingent Faculty Committee member Joe Berry’s indispensable COCAL Updates of the death last week of John Hess, following a six-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease.  John has been described by many as, in Berry’s words, “one of the fathers of the contingent faculty movement.”  The description is well-merited; John’s work…

Recognizing the Limited Scope of the NLRB’s Decision in Northwestern University

Earlier this week, on August 17, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a decision refusing to assert jurisdiction in the case of the Northwestern University grant-in-aid scholarship football players’ petition for an election seeking union representation. While this is a disappointment to those hoping that the Board would uphold the Regional Director’s ruling finding…

Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 9-10

  Chandler, Raymond.  The Long Goodbye.  Boston: Houghton, 1954. In creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler followed the model that Dashiell Hammett provided in Sam Spade.  Both are hardboiled detectives who expect the worst of most people and are seldom proven to be overly pessimistic.  Both operate on the dangerous ground between the criminal underworld and…

Trigger Warnings Triggering Memories of Teaching From Long Ago

Guest blogger Steve Krause published this on August 18, 2015 on his blog stevendkrause.com: A different kind of Trigger… There are two articles making the rounds about trigger warnings of late. There’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. And there’s (at least one) response to it, “The…