Alice Dreger Censored Again
BY HANK REICHMAN Alice Dreger, the controversial author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, an exciting and important defense of academic freedom in the sciences, who last year resigned a position at Northwestern University to protest the university’s censorship of sexual content in a faculty-sponsored publication, is once again…
"Automation, Automation, Automation"
BY AARON BARLOW In the 30+ years since I first looked into using digital technology in the classroom, my enthusiasm for it has waned. Today, I guess I have to classify myself as a Luddite. When I re-read Thomas Pynchon’s “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” my answer to his question is quite different from…
"Where workers strike and organize/Says he, You'll find Joe Hill"
BY AARON BARLOW When George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq war was beginning, I attended an antiwar march in New York City. It depressed me, thoroughly; I saw immediately that this crowd was never going to have an impact on American opinion or policy. Everyone (or so it seemed) had arrived to promote their own causes.…
Remembering Elsie Janis
BY AARON BARLOW At the end of The Big Show: My Six Months with the American Expeditionary Forces (1919), Elsie Janis wrote: Now I must call a halt. I love talking, and as I can’t talk to everyone, I like writing. Just a few words in parting to the women: You have been wonderful–and while I love…
The No Confidence Movement
BY RACHEL BUFF
CUNY at the Turning Point
BY AARON BARLOW New York City College of Technology, the City University of New York campus where I teach, has now spent more than a decade improving itself on the cheap. When I first taught here in 2001, it was a joke of a college, seen by many as undeserving of the name. Now, its…
Delusional Donald Tells Californians There Is No Drought
Here are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Steph Solis for USA Today: “California suffered one of its driest years in 2015. And last year the state hit its driest four-year period on record. “But Donald Trump isn’t sold. The presumptive GOP nominee told supporters in Fresno, California, on Friday night that no such dry spell exists. “Trump…
Why We're Not Grading Exams
After a successful two-day walkout of faculty across the United Kingdom led by the University and College Union, more than 1,000 scholars have resigned from their roles as external examiners, who are contracted to sit on exam boards at other universities to review students’ work and sign off final grades. A UCU spokesperson told The…
Starr and Trump–Self-Righteousness and Self-Glorification
This is an addendum to Hank Reichman’s post on Ken Starr. Here is a news item from Vanity Fair news writer Emily Jane Fox that succinctly synthesizes the recent news coverage related to Ken Starr—specifically the coverage of Starr’s comments about Bill Clinton and his investigation of the then-President’s sexual indiscretions and the coverage of…