Writing for the Indianapolis Business Journal, J. K. Wall has reported: “Indiana’s public colleges and universities, spurred by pressure from state lawmakers, are pumping out more graduates than ever. “But in spite of a 20-percent increase in degrees granted since 2010, the education level of Indiana’s younger adults has barely budged, for reasons that aren’t…
This post is an elaboration on a message that was sent to the members of our chapter at Wright State University, which itself was collaboratively drafted and developed from a message distributed by the chapter leadership at the University of Cincinnati. (In these kinds of things, it is “collaboration” and “sharing,” not “plagiarism.”) We have…
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…
This is a carefully prepared, persuasive, and at times eloquent speech. It would have been nice if such speeches had been given more consistently at the beginning of the Obama presidency, instead of at the tail end of it, and if they had reflected a broader and louder political focus on protecting and promoting labor rights.…
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…
The discussion of the “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas, and elsewhere has been seriously skewed by a failure to look very much, if at all, beyond the specific examples offered to justify the laws. This issue is not really about Christian fundamentalist florists or restaurant owners having to provide services to gay couples who…
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…
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…