BY AARON R. HANLON Aaron Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. He writes regularly on issues related to free speech on campus, including recently in the New York Times. The notion that college student protesters are reacting to “offensive” speech has held outsized influence in national debates about free speech and student…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short article for Variety, Erin Nyren has reported that the Executive Committee of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which awarded Harvey Weinstein the Du Bois Medal in 2014, has voted to revoke the award. The statement released by the Hutchins Center reads: “We have voted…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this first part of a multi-part article written for Information Clearing House, a media site and aggregator that I think can be fairly described as Far Left, William Blum offers the following explication of a Trump sentence. In Blum’s commentary, there is at least one remark on the projection of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an addendum to my recent post on the increasing concentration of wealth in the United States. Writing for Business Insider, Tanza Loudenback reports: There are 1,542 billionaires in the world, according to a new report by UBS. More than 560 billionaires live in the US—the most of any country—and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Several weeks ago, I posted a current political parody of a Simon and Garfunkel song [https://academeblog.org/2017/08/27/if-simon-and-garfunkel-were-troubadours-of-the-age-of-trump/]. Quite coincidentally, I came across this list of words coined fifty years ago, in 1967. (The Merriam-Webster website has a feature that allows you to get a list of the neologisms from any given year.)…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The AAUP, along with the Wisconsin AFT, has condemned a series of actions taken by Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin state legislature, and the University of Wisconsin system board of regents over the past few years in a concerted attack on the university as a public good. Regular readers of Academe…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ AND BILLY CZERWINSKI Tuesday night, the US Senate voted to gut a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that gave consumers, including student loan borrowers, recourse against banks who cheat us. This was a particularly remarkable act in light of recent revelations that Wells Fargo had fraudulently opened over three million fake accounts…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are two charts on the widening income inequality in the U.S. The first chart shows that the top .1% now own as much as the bottom 90% of Americans. The second chart shows that, in terms of income inequality, the U.S. is an outlier among developed nations. The following list…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In a thought-provoking essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University, wrote eloquently about the failure of American higher education to provide civic education to college students. Mr. Bok noted: “Political apathy is not evenly distributed throughout the population.Very conservative and very liberal voters are…