BY JOHN K. WILSON Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos to be his Secretary of Education. DeVos grew up as part of the wealthy Prince business family, and then married into the even wealthier DeVos (Amway) family. Her husband lost his run for governor and has pushed for right-to-work laws in Michigan. Inherited wealth is…
BY ANDRE PERRY This blog post originally appeared as a column in The Hechinger Report on November 22, and appears here with the author’s permission. Guest blogger Andre Perry is the former founding dean of urban education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The world is not flat; dinosaurs didn’t walk with humans and white…
BY STEPHEN KUUSISTO When I was very small I didn’t know that I’d meet people who wouldn’t like me until one day, climbing stairs with my father, my hand in his, we met an elderly Swedish woman who lived just below us and who said, “Tsk, Tsk” because I was blind. I was only four…
BY DONNA YOUNG This is a guest post by Donna Young, the guest editor of the November–December Academe issue. She is a law professor at Albany Law School and president of the Albany Law School AAUP chapter. My editor’s note for the current issue of Academe, which focuses on the theme “Race on Campus,” begins with the statement, “All is not…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is the way that the meeting has been reported in an article written by Emily Smith and Daniel Halper and published in the New York Post: Donald Trump’s Media Summit Was a ‘F—Ing Firing Squad’ Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sit-down on Monday, sources…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is the opening of an article on Louisiana’s continuing budget crisis, written by Heath Allen for WDSU News: “Louisiana’s state colleges and universities face another $18 million in budget cuts as part of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ plan to fill a looming $312 million budget shortfall. “But during a meeting…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a short but telling item from the Hechinger Report: “The number of executive, administrative and managerial employees on university campuses nationwide continued its relentless rise right through the recession, up by a collective 15 percent between 2007 and 2014, federal data show. “”Hear a SpareMin podcast on this topic here with Matt…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Don’t be entirely surprised if this Golden Pheasant replaces the Bald Eagle as the National Bird: Photographed at Hangzhou Safari Park in Hangzhou, China (Reuters/Stringer)
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of “From Truthiness to PostTruth, Just in Time for Donald Trump: Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year Should Scare the Hell out of You,” an article written by Erin Keane for Salon: “Remember back in 2006, when Stephen Colbert, the fictional conservative blowhard TV personality played…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an announcement from Prose: Dear students: The platform that brought you #Write4Good invites you to participate in a new writing challenge. This one has a chance to make literary history. Let’s take a look at the prompt: It’s record-breaking time. Together, we are going to break the world record for…