In 1928, Horatio Alger: A Biography Without a Hero by Herbert R. Mayes appeared. For over 40 years, it was the “go to” source for information about the iconic boys’ writer. Mayes parlayed the success of his book into an editing career crowned, in the sixties, with a term as president of McCall Corporation, publisher…
It has been a while since I made the initial post in what I intended to become a series. These are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories: Back, with New Wrinkles [Title of an article on…
Testimony before the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education Presented by Grace Goodluck May 19th, 2015 Honorable Chairman Gardner and members of the committee, My name is Grace Goodluck, and I just completed my sophomore year at Kent State University. College was always presented to me as an inevitable part of my future–I was…
The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
Just as he is, in many ways, the godfather to the blogs, Benjamin Franklin’s spirit stands over the baptism of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Something new and different? No. As are all children, MOOCs were birthed out of a long line of ancestors. Franklin’s Junto and subsequent libraries, the Lyceum movement, New Thought…
Ahead of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Business Insider published this list of the twelve most difficult winning words in the history of the contest. No doubt, the selections have become somewhat arbitrary: that is, I am certain that there are some equally obscure and difficult alternatives available from other years. 2011: cymotrichous (adj.) — having…
In one of my posts yesterday, I gave a plug to Mental Floss, highlighting three items that I found of interest that were posted on a single day in February. In another post to that site on that same day, “Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional,” Lucas Reilly chronicles…
The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…
Laura McKenna has written an excellent article for The Atlantic, titled “The Cost of an Adjunct.” I include the paragraph that references the AAUP’s analysis of the contingent component of the professoriate. Ms McKenna, however, is somewhat confused about the estimated percentages of tenured, tenure track, full-time “term” appointments, and part-time faculty. The AAUP summary states…
Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the controversy surrounding the decision last November by the Board of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies to reject a proposed fellowship program named for the prominent scholar Stephen F. Cohen and his late mentor and friend Robert C. Tucker, apparently because of…