POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for Crain’s Chicago Business, Steven R. Strahler reports on the growing exodus of faculty from Illinois public universities and colleges. In some cases, the faculty have been forced to look for positions elsewhere after being furloughed in response to budget shortfalls. But in most instances, the faculty have…
BY HANK REICHMAN Amid the growing controversy over the leak of thousands of emails hacked from servers at the Democratic National Committee, apparently by a group linked to the Russian government, comes this report in The Times of London: President Putin has launched a secret propaganda assault on Britain from within its own borders, The Times can…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Trump on the NYT: 'They don't write good'… #morningjoe reacts. https://t.co/yfzY553ZCK — Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 2, 2016
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a post yesterday, Hank Reichman noted that August 1 was the 50th anniversary of the mass murder committed by Charles Whitman on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Whitman had barricaded himself on top of the tower that was the tallest structure on the campus and began…
BY JOHN K. WILSON DePaul University has banned conservative pundit Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus to the Young Americans for Freedom student group. Bob Janis, Vice President of Facilities Operations at DePaul, sent an email declaring, “Given the experiences and security concerns that some other schools have had with Ben Shapiro speaking on their…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the Fall of 2014 I posted several entries to this blog (see here, here, and here) suggesting that “recent attempts to enforce standards of ‘civility’ at colleges and universities, often . . . in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to exclude alleged communists from…
BY HANK REICHMAN I am old enough to remember August 1, 1966 — fifty years ago today — when a mentally disturbed ex-marine, Charles Whitman, climbed to the top of the tower at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) with an arsenal of high-powered weapons and began shooting. For 96 terrifying minutes, Whitman fired…
BY MARTIN KICH Let’s not beat around the bush. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that all politicians are full of shit. Why is a guy who is so patently full of shit—who repeatedly says things on camera and then very shortly afterwards denies that he said them (just today, he said that John…
BY MARTIN KICH Not all stories are big stories, but sometimes the small stories are illustrative in ways that bigger stories cannot be because as the scope of a story becomes narrower, the implications can be seen in a more personalized way. In the Music Department at Pacific Lutheran University, changes have been proposed that,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Elizabeth Campbell for Bloomberg News, titled “Illinois Colleges Besieged by Cuts as Budget Battle Trickles Down”: “For Illinois’s colleges and universities, the end of a record-long political fight over the budget isn’t bringing the financial consequences to a close. “Southern Illinois…