POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Leonard, Elmore. Get Shorty. New York: Delacorte, 1990. Almost single-handedly, Elmore Leonard brought the genre of crime fiction to renewed prominence. Although the sub-genre stretches back to James M. Cain and was enriched by Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson, it was eclipsed by the proliferation in the categories of mystery detective…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a photo of parents of university students sleeping on mats in a gymnasium during a “parents’ weekend” at a university in Wuhan, China.
BY MARTIN KICH Business Insider has aggregated the NFL draft projections of five “experts”: Todd McShay, Mel Kiper, Jr., Rob Rang, Matt Miller, and Steve Palazzolo. What is of interest to me is less who the particular players are than which programs they are playing for. Before listing the individual players, I have aggregated the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Mexico In January 2015, the Universidad Valle de Mexico campus in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo was “closed for more than a week due to threats and attempted extortion by gangsters”: “The campus closed in response to a threat received from a criminal gang that wanted to enter the…
BY HANK REICHMAN This week’s controversy over Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s tweet about “white genocide” has once again raised the perpetually thorny issue of academic freedom’s claim to protect the “extramural utterances” of faculty members who speak as private citizens. As of this writing it appears that Drexel administrators have disavowed any intent to…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is excerpted from a piece published earlier this month in University World News by Ole Petter Ottersen, rector of the University of Oslo, Norway. How should universities confront a post-truth world? By Ole Petter Ottersen In a world characterised by increasing turbulence and conflict, and of inequities and dissatisfaction,…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following guest post by UCLA history professor Michael Meranze is reposted from his Remaking the University blog. As you have probably seen, George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel University has come under fire for tweeting “all I want for Christmas is white genocide,” following his tweet and his condemnation at…
BY HANK REICHMAN “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” That was the content of a tweet posted Christmas eve by George Ciccariello-Maher, associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University. Ciccariello-Maher was trying to make an ironic political point and was not in fact calling for mass killing, but that didn’t…
POSTED BY JOHN K. WILSON Donald Trump announced today that he will be shutting down the Donald J. Trump Foundation. But he won’t be shutting down the investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office, nor should he shut down the scrutiny over his corrupt charity. The Trump Foundation existed for Trump to use for…
BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest blogger Galen Leonhardy is an AAUP member living and teaching in Illinois. On December 19, my dear long-time friend, Starla, replied to “UW, WSU Brace for Speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart Editor Banned from Twitter,” a Seattle Times article floating around Facebook. The article’s author, Katherine Long, tells readers that an infamous…