Meaningful Work and the Creative Impulse

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…

For colleges to succeed, faculty must become students

For Colleges to Succeed, Faculty Must Become Students

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…

Update from UnKoch My Campus

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,…

Timely Satire beyond SNL and the Late-Night Talk Shows

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…

A Few Non-Scientific Reflections on Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper

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…

Quotation of the Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I was doing some research on Trump jokes on late-night talk shows on television, and I happened across this observation in an article published by HuffPost Entertainment in August 2017. It is the short final paragraph of “Stephen Colbert Just Earned His Biggest Ratings Win over Jimmy Fallon,” an article written…

SCOTUS Union Attack Rooted in Politics

BY JOHN McNAY The Supreme Court’s attack on the labor movement last week by the five Republican justices was an unjust act rooted entirely in politics and having nothing to do with the Constitution. It is a right-wing fantasy to suggest that everything public union members do is a political act. With the increasing corporate…