Silent Sam at UNC: Sign of the Times
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT, ALTHA CRAVEY, AND JAY M. SMITH Nearly three months after the Confederate statue was toppled by activists, “Silent Sam” continues to roil the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite the controversy’s campus-specific particularities, the questions it raises are emblematic of the issues confronting many campuses in our age of…
C’mon, Man!
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Presidents should be required to have a minimum of self-awareness. I don’t think that this expectation should require a constitutional amendment or even a great deal of perception on the part of voters. Critics of President Trump focus on his ineptitude as a diplomat, his apparent ignorance of and even disinterest…
The Cost of Protecting Betsy DeVos
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Alexandra Hutzler for Newsweek: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s security detail, one of the most extensive in the Trump administration, will cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $20 million through the fall of 2019. DeVos began receiving nonstop security from the U.S. Marshals Service…
The Assault on Gender and Gender Studies
BY RANA JALEEL AND HANK REICHMAN In October, we learned that the Trump administration is considering a new legal definition of gender under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. Gender would be narrowly defined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable” as…
Even before the Latest Outbreak of Fires in California
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The image is from Popular Science [https://www.popsci.com/science/]. The current home page features an article on the current fires, “California’s Forest Management Isn’t the Problem” [https://www.popsci.com/forest-management-california-fires]. Writing for the Washington Post, Susan Svrluga has reported on the controversy surrounding a shelter-in-place order at Pepperdine University: Pepperdine University’s 3,600 undergraduates were ordered…
Quotation of the Day
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH If blacks vote in great numbers, progressive whites win. It’s the only way progressive whites win. If blacks vote in great numbers, Hispanics win. If blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites vote, women win. When women win, children win. When women and children win, workers win. We must all come up together.…
United for America
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Understanding instead of fear-mongering, compassion instead of suspicion, dignity instead of degradation News media that protect the public interest instead of chasing ratings and profits, that emphasize truth over sensationalism, and that explore controversies instead of stoking them Insistence that our political leaders represent the best traits in our national character…
College Campuses Are Far From Radical
BY ED BURMILA The following is reposted with permission from The Outline. Ed Burmila is assistant professor of political science at Bradley University. The 2014 right-wing fever dream of a film God’s Not Dead, a fantasy version of higher education for young adults raised on the Left Behind series, is a comic masterpiece, at least…
The Perfectly Incoherent Trumpism of Charlie Kirk’s Campus Battlefield
BY SIMON MALOY The following review of Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and creator of the notorious Professor Watchlist, is reposted with permission from Media Matters. Simon Maloy is a senior writer at Media Matters. Formerly a political writer…