Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California system recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which she argued that, despite the challenges created by unprecedented cuts in state support for public higher education, it is a gross exaggeration to assert that American higher education is in crisis. Scott H. Levine,…
This past week, Bill O’Reilly cited, for the second time, statistics that supposedly show that more Whites than African-Americans are killed by police. Although he framed the discussion of these statistics by stating that he was in no way condoning the recent police shooting of an unarmed African-American man in North Charleston, South Carolina, he…
“Publish or perish” is a common expression in academia. PhD holders must achieve the required number of publications between the time of appointment to a tenure-track position and turning in the dossier to the Promotion and Tenure committee or risk restarting a grueling job search. The stress that this pressure to publish induces has brought…
After the 1980 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan headed for Philadelphia, Mississippi where he affirmed his commitment to states’ rights. There was nothing overtly racial about his speech, but the “dog whistle” was heard: It was near Philadelphia that three civil-rights workers had been murdered in 1964 at the height of a movement whose success came…
Rudy Fichtenbaum has sent me the following statistical analysis in response to the assertions made by Campos in the article in the New York Times and as a follow-up to my own post on that article. I don’t think that anything that Rudy points out in this analysis substantially contradicts anything that I have asserted…
In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, Paul F. Campos has offered his opinion on “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much.” [The whole piece is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0] Campos argues that attributing the rise in tuition costs to reductions in state funding is a fairy tale that administrators have been…
Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass. New York: Knopf, 1937. Conrad Richter is best known for his Awakening Land trilogy about the settlement of the Ohio frontier: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950). But Richter’s earliest stories and novels were set on the later and very different frontier of the…
Benjamin Franklin includes this list in his 1731 “Apology for Printers”: I request all who are angry with me on the Account of printing things they don’t like, calmly to consider these following Particulars That the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces; an Observation general enough to become a common Proverb,…
This past week the Oregon legislature passed and the governor of that state signed legislation that would automatically register to vote every citizen with a driver’s license issued by the state. I was going to write a post contrasting that law with a late amendment to Ohio’s transportation bill that would have required people from…