POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the New York Times, Anna Dubenko has gathered reactions from the Left, Right, and Center to Betsy DeVos’ proposal to revamp Title IX enforcement. From the Right David French in the National Review: “Our campuses are not exempt from the Constitution. There is no excuse for government-mandated kangaroo courts…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Consortium News, Robert Parry provides an extended contrast between Harvard’s bowing to political pressure by withdrawing a visiting professorship offered to Chelsea Manning and its failure to reconsider a similar appointment given to former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell,who resigned his own fellowship in protest and denounced Manning as…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short piece for the New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross quotes extensively from a prisoner’s account of what it has been like to experience Harvey from inside a maximum-security cell in a prison in the severely affected region of Texas. Here are the opening paragraphs that provide a context for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Why are women and girls still so underrepresented in the study and teaching of STEM disciplines? The question has received a good deal of attention recently, as it should, and one common conclusion is that sexist attitudes and practices, including blatant sexual harassment and discrimination, remain far too common and are often…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH All state budget impasses do not have the same causes, but, at the risk of oversimplification, there are basically two main categories of causes. The first is fiscal irresponsibility that involves overspending on special-interest projects and underfunding of major continuing costs. The second is fiscal irresponsibility that places such a priority…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for CNBC, Abigail Hess reports on why international students are applying to and enrolling at Canadian colleges and universities instead of U.S. institutions. Hess provides the following statistics: The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers surveyed over 250 American colleges and universities and found that 39…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Reviewing Frederick Crews’ new biography for the Washington Post, Matthew Hutson titles his review “Young Freud, Cruel, Incurious, Deceptive, and in Search of Fame.” Regardless of what one thinks of Freud’s contributions to human thought, science, and the discipline of psychology, the biography paints a portrait of a young man who…
BY HANK REICHMAN It seems the much-ballyhooed and monstrously misnamed “Free Speech Week,” organized by the infamous bigot-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and scheduled to unfold September 24-27 at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), may not take place after all. And if it does, it will be in a scaled-down version. The event was to…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Dear Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell, Democratic Leader Pelosi, and Democratic Leader Schumer: We write out of deep concern for approximately two million Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Over the past five years, hundreds of thousands of these young people came forward in good…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The New York Times Editorial Board has published a lengthy editorial on the Trump administration’s persistent efforts to deny scientific consensus and to place in positions of power people who share that disdain for scientific truths that conflict with narrow corporate interests and Far-Right ideological talking points. The editorial begins by…