UC Faculty Defend Public Education

BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization.  Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…

Dumbing Down “Genius”

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH   Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle   DaVinci   Galileo   Newton   Shakespeare   Franklin   Lincoln   Edison   Tesla   Freud   Einstein   Hawking   Trump _________________________ If you have not been following the news, here are the opening paragraphs of an article written by David A. Graham…

Who Counts As an "Educator"?

BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.”  The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…

Irony of the Day

BY MARTIN KICH An alternative title to this post might be “’Redefining The Takers.’” The New York Times has reported the possibility that Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for more than two decades because of a $913,000,000 loss reported in 1995. In response to the story, Trump has asserted that he…

The Political Divide in the Perception of Higher Ed

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a chart summarizing a recent Pew Research survey on how political ideology affects the perception of American institutions: The complete survey, including a link to a detailed breakdown of the results in PDF, can be found at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/from-universities-to-churches-republicans-and-democrats-differ-in-views-of-major-institutions/ Education Dive has provided the following “highlights” of and “insights” about…

Irony of the Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This short item was written by Andrew Kaczynski for BuzzFeed: “Guests at several of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s hotels woke up to a complimentary copy of USA Today’s blistering editorial that concluded Trump was “unfit” to be president. “The newspaper’s editorial board weighed in on the presidential race for the first time in…

Donald the One-Trick Pony

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an excerpt from Dylan Matthews’ article for Vox, “Three Winners and Two Losers from the First Presidential Debate.” I think that it complements Kelly Wilz’s widely read post to this blog, “A Feminist’s Guide to Critiquing Hillary Clinton.” _________________________ Loser: Donald Trump  Rough night. Drew Angerer/Getty Images Say what you…

Juxtaposition of the Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Trump Jr. to Trib: Dad Will ‘Separate’ from Business Interests if Elected BY TOM FONTAINE  | Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016, 7:39 p.m. Donald Trump Jr. dismissed a new report Wednesday that his family’s international business interests could present conflicts and ethical quandaries should his father be elected president. “My father is going to be a…