POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The other day I posted an item reporting efforts by the government of Hungary to ban programs in gender studies. Yesterday the following letter was sent to Jozsef Bodis, Hungarian Minister of Education: Minister of Education Hungary jozsef.bodis@emmi.gov.hu Dear Minister of Education, We write to protest the Hungarian government’s proposed law…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charlie Kirk is the twenty-something founder of the right-wing “student group” Turning Point USA, sponsor of the notorious Professor Watchlist. Kirk’s group is so nutso that even the Charles Koch Foundation and the Young America’s Foundation have turned against it. Sarah Ruger, director of Free Speech Initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week Hungarian universities received 24 hours from the Ministry of Human Capacities and the Ministry of Justice to comment on a proposed amendment, which declares that gender studies courses may no longer be offered in Hungary, the Hungarian economic and political weekly Heti Világgazdaság (HVG.hu) reported yesterday. According to a report…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s annual conference in June Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was the plenary luncheon speaker. Chapter 7 of her book was published separately…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I’m disturbed by many of the arguments against the decision by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to hire as a senior fellow Marc Short, the former White House director of legislative affairs and senior adviser to President Donald Trump. William Hitchcock and Melvyn Leffler, history professors at Virginia, resigned from…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the lack of both unified and resonant messaging by candidates on the Progressive side of the ideological spectrum. I personally think that the lack of resonant messaging is much more important, especially in these off-year elections. But here are three examples of very…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH CNN’s David Gelles has surveyed the number of times that President Trump has refereed to the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “witch hunt”: 2017-05: 3 times 2017-06: 5 times 2017-07: 6 times 2017-10: 1 time 2017-12: 2 times 2018-01: 1 time 2018-02: 3 times 2018-03:…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On July 18, the headline of the Los Angeles Times daily newsletter was “Trump’s Double-Negative Defense.” Trump’s explanation that the uproar over his press conference with Putin is much to do about nothing because he simply meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would” seems an attempt to reduce much broader issues…