BY HANK REICHMAN The Trump administration’s disregard for and assault on science have been well documented by the AAUP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others. Now President Trump himself and his FEMA administrator, Brock Long, have attacked the credibility of a study by George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, which found…
BY AARON BARLOW Most everything I’ve read about NYU’s Avital Ronell misses what should be the most significant point of the messy affair. Yes, Ronell should not be defended in knee-jerk fashion nor piled on by acrimonious former colleagues. Nor is it enough to bemoan the impact of the case on the classroom. What we really…
ДBY HANK REICHMAN A new survey of 63,000 scientific experts across 16 federal agencies, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in cooperation with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, shows that the Trump administration continues to “sideline science.” According to the survey, government scientists report iissues including “censorship…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH My previous post included information on a species of shark named after Eugenie Clark. By happy coincidence, our chapter’s ongoing effort to illustrate how faculty make a difference in their students’ lives, in their communities, and in their disciplines now includes this item: Tom Rooney is a professor of biology at…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the Washington Post’s “Speaking of Science” newsletter, an unidentified author, writing in the first-person, provides the following take on “Shark Week,” along with a somewhat detailed commemorative overview of the career of Eugenie Clark, who broke gender barriers in becoming an expert on sharks, and then a few recollections of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Each year, “Shark Week” marks the persistently popular, binge recycling of the films in the Jaws franchise and several dozen documentaries about how sharks mercilessly hunt seals and other prey. (As if to balance out the carnage inflicted upon the seals, in one documentary a Great White is ambushed and killed…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Discover, Nathaniel Scharping seems to do a very creditable job explaining “What Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Says (And Doesn’t Say).” I say “seems to” not because I have any reason whatsoever to question what he writes but because I know relatively little about even basic physics and next to…
BY HANK REICHMAN In November 2017 the AAUP released a report on National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom, which decried “increasing restrictions on and threats to the global exchange of scientific research and the academic freedom of American scientists to interact with foreign colleagues,” especially those from China. Now the Trump administration…
BY AARON BARLOW Since the beginning of my academic career, I have intertwined the personal with my objects of study. After tentative moves toward some nonsense dissertation related to literary theory, I chucked it all and wrote on my favorite science-fiction writer. That, as they say, was my ‘defining moment.’ At the time, there was…