Please Sign Petitions Supporting the Voting Rights of College Students in Ohio and North Carolina

Recently, I wrote a post titled “Suppress the vote, 2013-2014—on Campus” (https://academeblog.org/2013/04/28/suppress-the-vote-2013-2014-versions-on-campus/). In the post, I describe the efforts of the Republican majorities in the North Carolina and the Ohio legislature to create penalties that will effectively reduce the numbers of college students voting in both states. In North Carolina, parents will now lose the…

One Bad Idea after Another

Last week, I posted a piece on the Ohio state legislature’s oxymoronic proposal to preserve state park and forest land by licensing fracking operations on those lands. I expressed my concern that areas previously degraded by and still recovering from coal mining would be degraded again by fracking. A reader pointed out that the environmental…

More Bad Ideas on Higher Education from Florida

This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] A bill was recently introduced in the Florida legislature that would bypass the established system of accreditation and allow local state officials to accredit MOOCs and other online courses, including those from unaccredited for-profit providers.…

Why I Did Not Vote Yesterday

Although I live in a very Republican area and the candidates for whom I have voted have almost never won, I have almost never failed to vote. And I have never voted against a school levy—or for that matter a levy to support city or county parks or other civic improvements. But I did not vote…

Not Just Appalling, but Hypocritical and Illogical, Too

It is a common tactic among bullies to be absolutely blind to their own insensitivity toward others while being hypersensitive to any perceived slights against them. And that truism has never been on display more absurdly and hypocritically than at this year’s NRA Convention in Texas. Amid all of the hyperventilated rhetoric about President Obama’s…

Campaigning Isn’t Governing, Sound Bytes Aren’t Journalism, and MOOCs Aren’t Education

The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…

Right to Work, by the Numbers: Part 4

Historic Highs and Lows in Unemployment In my previous post in this series, I closed by noting that proponents of “right to work” might very well want to emphasize that eight of the ten states with the lowest current unemployment averages are “right to work” states. Those states are Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, South…

Ohio: Where Oxymoronic Legislation Proliferates like Fracking Platforms

The following mission statement is taken directly from the website for the Clean Ohio Fund: “The Clean Ohio Fund restores, protects, and connects Ohio’s important natural and urban places by preserving green space and farmland, improving outdoor recreation, and cleaning up brownfields to encourage redevelopment and revitalize communities.” More specifically, the site delineates the ways…