Kudos to Montana Governor Steve Bullock who has vetoed legislation passed by Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature that would have permitted students to keep guns in their dorm rooms. Here are the lead paragraphs from the Huffington Post article: “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) vetoed a bill Monday that would have allowed guns on college…
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…
Employment in Manufacturing Today, only about 8.2% of U.S. workers are employed in manufacturing. Even before the Great Recession, manufacturing employment in the U.S. had been steadily declining, with a loss of approximately 4,000,000 jobs between 1998 and 2007, the decade preceding the recession. Another 1.6 million jobs in manufacturing were lost between 2008 and…
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…
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.…
This post originally appeared in Raging Chicken Press earlier today. If you are interested in this issue, I will continue to follow this issue as over the next few weeks – KM Just over a week before Kutztown University will welcome the families and friends of soon-to-be graduates, the university has decided to revise a…
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…
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…
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…