POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an item by Jeva Lange for The Week: President Trump’s alleged word choice when referring to African nations during an immigration meeting on Thursday has sparked bipartisan and international condemnation. The latest scathing rebuke, though, has come from … the dictionary. It is surely no coincidence that Merriam-Webster’s word of the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is taken from the AAUP’s website: The AAUP submitted an amicus brief December 28 to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit urging the Court to uphold the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) determination that non-tenure-track faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) are…
BY HANK REICHMAN Faculty members in other states may be excused for expressing some jealousy of California’s economic and political success since Jerry Brown was elected governor nearly eight years ago. While Republican-led states like Kansas, Iowa, or Wisconsin continue to suffer slow growth and calamitous budget shortfalls and cuts, under Brown and a Democratic…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH We often hear concerns expressed about Division I athletes who help to generate significant sports-related revenue for their universities but who do not complete degrees and who do not have extended professional careers or do not even get professional contracts. But when one considers that Division II players typically do not…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a summary, provided in the News Hour daily newsletter, of an article titled “College Football and Presidential Politics,” written by Lisa Desjardins for PBS: Last night’s college football championship sparked a nerdy late-night question: If a handful of states can dominate a particular sport, is the same true for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following excerpts are from an article by Larissa Lawrie written for Salon: On November 7, Kansas voters elected Brandon Johnson to serve on the Wichita City Council for District 1 and elected Angela Becker to serve on the USD 373 Board of Education. As political outsiders, their elections were watched closely.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Kansas Legislator Tries to Reframe Racist Comments as an Expression of Racial Empathy This is from the Daily Beast Cheat Sheet: A Republican Kansas legislator apologized late Monday night for employing openly racist logic to explain why he believes marijuana should remain illegal. “Marijuana is an entry drug into the higher…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following news release has been issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists: As U.S. President Donald Trump announces his “Fake Media” awards, the Committee to Protect Journalists names its global Press Oppressors—world leaders who use rhetoric, legal action, and censorship to try to silence their critics. The list features leaders…
BY HANK REICHMAN The other day, as part of an informal self-reeducation in American history prompted by our current political fix, I was rereading after many decades Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 The American Political Tradition, a series of portraits of leading American politicians from the founders to FDR. Only one of Hofstadter’s subjects, the abolitionist Wendell…
BY AARON BARLOW David Brooks writes in today’s The New York Times of “the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one.” This has always been a favorite conservative trope, that we should yearn for the beliefs and coherences of yesteryear. Yet it has no truth behind it, as any…