This is a postscript to my post “And Here I Thought That Louie Gohmert Was the Most Ridiculous Congressman from Texas” [https://academeblog.org/2013/06/20/and-here-i-thought-that-louie-gohmert-was-the-most-ridiculous-congressman-from-texas/]. One of the few bills to receive overwhelming bipartisan support over the past three years has been one that eliminated the use of the word “lunatic” in all federal legislation. Paralleling the 2010…
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Arizona’s voter most recently enacted voter registration law to be unconstitutional. The law required that those registering to vote provide copies of several documents proving their citizenship, pointedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 which sought to encourage voting by providing a simple, federally processed form…
As we confront the challenges to public education that focus only on its failings, it is extremely important that we recognize who is leveling the criticisms and why. In many instances, the fact that public education has become a target reveals more about the political ideologies and the personal obsessions of those attacking it than…
This is a re-post from the On the Issues blog maintained by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/]. ************************* After a brief experiment in charging tuition, Germany—the strongest economy in Europe and one of the strongest in the world–is abolishing fees at its colleges and universities. Why? As quoted in a recent…
A cluster of recent articles has addressed the growing issue of access to higher education for students from poor and working-class backgrounds. Published in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann’s “How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich” opens with an assertion that is absolutely true but will come as a major surprise to…
This item has appeared on the website of KAIT in Jonesboro, Arkansas: “Arkansas State University is yet another institution to opt out of the new state gun law. The board of trustees met Thursday to discuss the proposal that would allow faculty and staff to carry concealed handguns on campus under the law. “The University of…
Guns on Campus, Discouraging News, Addendum 1 The cable news networks, like the newspapers long before them, have turned “tabloid” coverage of crimes and trials into a staple element of their programming. It may have started with the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, but, if the recent ratings for the coverage of the Jodi…
A Senate investigation has revealed that between 2009 and 2012, Apple avoided paying taxes on $44 billion in profits that it earned offshore. Where the corporation did pay taxes on its offshore earnings, it paid at a much reduced rate. Taking advantage of low corporate tax rates in Ireland, it made that country the base–at…
In an earlier post, “Please Sign Petitions Supporting the Voting Rights of College Students in Ohio and North Carolina” [https://academeblog.org/2013/05/11/please-sign-petitions-supporting-the-voting-rights-of-college-students-in-ohio-and-north-carolina/], I asked readers to sign a petition protesting against an attempt to discourage more than 32,000 out-of-state students attending Ohio universities from casting their ballots in Ohio. What follows is the testimony of Stuart McIntyre,…
As our chapters and conferences confront major issues, we often create “toolkits” that include sample letters to other constituencies within our institutions (administrators, staff, and especially students), to groups that may be potential allies, to legislators, and to newspapers and other online media sites. But, beyond those salient issues, there is typically a multitude of…