POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a June 28 article for the Associated Press, Eva Vergara has reported: After a long day of work, Sofia Brito fell asleep on a chair in an office at Chile’s Constitutional Court. She says she awoke abruptly to find her mentor, the court’s president, atop her and caressing her hair.…
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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Any resurgence of the American labor movement is going to have to focus on workers in the most exploited categories—from warehouse workers to misclassified “independent contractors” to adjunct faculty—whose numbers will continue to increase due to automation and the corporatization of the public sector. Under the headings “A Prime Day for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH One of the basic logical fallacies that composition teachers warn their students to avoid is argument by analogy. No one has ever accused California Governor Jerry Brown of being uneducated or unintelligent. But, all too often, Progressives have latched onto their own harebrained ideas about “reforming” education. Of course, political brainstorms…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The results of California’s recent Senate primary have demonstrated that there are 62,830 Californians who are Nazis or very willing to vote for Nazis. In the primary, incumbent Diane Feinstein received 2,031,967 votes, or 44.2% of the 4,600,471 votes, and her challenger in the November general election, Kevin DeLeon, another Democrat,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following item is from Labour Start, which reports on international labor issues: Maxim Balashov, a professor of mathematics, has been working at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) for nineteen years. He also serves as chair of the trade union at his university, known as UNISOL. The bosses…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was published in the late spring, it received considerable media attention. Writing for Salon, Erin Keane provided a fairly succinct summary of Graeber’s definition of such employment: The first half of the book is devoted to building a clear understanding of what is…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In our new book – How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators and Policymakers – Dr. Joey King and I lay out the case for revitalizing the shared governance structure under which higher education institutions operate. We see governance, especially at the trustee level, as a significant…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I am sharing this update from Samantha Parsons, who along with her colleague Ralph Wilson and our own John Wilson, made a presentation on their efforts at the annual meeting in June. I know you’ve been following the court case between students at George Mason University and the school’s fundraising body,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I subscribe to the New Yorker and am very familiar with Andy Borowitz’s satiric pieces. But I did not think to put several of them together as they have been in the following item distributed several months ago by the Progressive Review in its weekly Undernews newsletter: Trump Puts Andy Borowitz…