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…
The following item, which appeared in the Ohio Conference’s weekly communications to our members, highlights the value of getting “our” message out and not relying on our institutions and our administrations to be the only spokespersons on higher-ed-related legislation. By the way, in typing the title of this post, I just realized that we routinely…
The following letter was published in the Toledo Blade this past week. It was written in response to a seemingly well intentioned and fairly thoughtful op-ed on the increasing tuition and fees being paid students and their families, which unfortunately suggested that faculty compensation and the leverage provided by unionization were among the main culprits:…
But that is the fault of neither the poets nor their poems. (Except perhaps for one or two poems about delicious meals.) Truth be told, I would probably have gotten fat even if I were illiterate. Probably fatter. Poems are high-calorie brain food, but they so fire the mind that the calories burn off as…
The following is the text of a talk that I delivered on March 30, 2015 at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, as part of the Spring Semester Centennial Speakers Series. The series celebrates the centennial of the AAUP and the contributions of all those who have served within leadership positions in the WSU AAUP…
The following is the Executive Summary of a report issued recently by the California Faculty Association, which represents all faculty in the 23-campus California State University system. The report is the second in a series. The first paper in this series, “Race to the Bottom: CSU’s 10-Year Failure to Fund Its Core Mission,” examined faculty…
Here at WordPress.com, we‘re always looking for ways to improve the blogging experience. We pride ourselves on taking your suggestions to heart and work tirelessly to create better tools for you. Today, we’re releasing a game changer. As WordPress.com becomes easier to use, one piece of unanswered feedback keeps nagging at us: blogging is hard!…
Aaron Barlow’s post today concerns legislation proposed in North Carolina that will uniformly increase teaching loads at all public universities to four courses per semester. I might look at this kind of legislation somewhat differently if the Far Right was interested in funding public higher education at any reasonable level and some legislators were, in…