POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I have been collecting pieces of the way that the arts can help us to fashion a response to disturbing political circumstances. What follows is a brief excerpt from “In the Dark Times,” a poem by Bertolt Brecht that was written in response to times much darker than our own: “In…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Yesterday, I posted a breakdown of the percentages of metro areas of various sizes that Clinton and Trump won. The following chart complements that chart because it breaks down the vote by number of counties carried by each candidate and the relative GDP of those counties, with a comparison between the…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Last month’s Huffington Post College article (also published on Academe), “Grading Higher Education: When Worlds Collide,” sparked a lively offline discussion and is worthy of additional exploration. In that post, we examined how various magazines, journals, and other outlets grade American higher education in their version of what some call the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Music can be an indispensable solace, inspiration, and fortification. Over the past several weeks I’ve needed all three, and I suspect others have as well. So I’ve put together this playlist to help us through the next four years. Thirty songs out of many. (Sadly, for a good number of them you’ll…
BY HANK REICHMAN On November 18, the American Association of University Professors joined the American Federation of Teachers, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more than 100 other organizations in a letter calling on president-elect Donald Trump to denounce acts of hate on college campuses and elsewhere. That morning I spoke at a press conference…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD (WITH INTRODUCTION BY HENRY REICHMAN) Since it first appeared in the New York Times a week ago, I’ve been meaning to write something in response to Princeton professor Mark Lilla’s op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” But I’ve been traveling and had to put off the task, hoping along the way to write something…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos to be his Secretary of Education. DeVos grew up as part of the wealthy Prince business family, and then married into the even wealthier DeVos (Amway) family. Her husband lost his run for governor and has pushed for right-to-work laws in Michigan. Inherited wealth is…
BY ANDRE PERRY This blog post originally appeared as a column in The Hechinger Report on November 22, and appears here with the author’s permission. Guest blogger Andre Perry is the former founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The world is not flat; dinosaurs didn’t walk with humans and white…