Guest blogger Jacob A. Bennett lives and works in Philadelphia, where he teaches rhetoric, poetry, and literature. I was surprised to receive, and happy to accept, an invitation to attend this year’s annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Conference of the AAUP on October 3. The keynote speaker, Dr. Gerald Beyer of Villanova University (the host…
The American professoriate once ranged from professionals who taught a course as an adjunct—a contribution to their professions, the compensation being almost nothing—to the regular (but generally poorly paid, often relying on family fortune to sustain them) faculty who generally assumed lifetime security at institutions whose operation their colleagues dominated. That changed over the decades starting…
Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for…
In a comment on my recent post “Four Things to Know about the Debate over Guns,” a reader quoted John F. Kennedy and George Washington on the value of an armed citizenry as a hedge against government tyranny. Yet, in the post itself, I never suggest eliminating gun ownership. I simply present statistics. Though I…
truthout has recently published an investigative article by Yves Smith that explains why private equity firms have been investing heavily in corporate charter schools. Drawing on articles published by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the article provides an extended explanation of how these multi-layered scams have been implemented by some of that city’s charter school operators. But,…
This post was written by Jeff Bryant for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, the…
Alan Singer is a professor of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership and the program director of graduate programs in Social Studies Education at Hofstra University. Dr. Singer is a former New York City high school social studies teacher and is editor of Social Science Docket, a joint publication of the New York and New Jersey Councils…
At Minding the Campus, National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood calls the adoption by other colleges of the University of Chicago statement on freedom of expression “a dangerous mistake.” It is always dangerous when extremists imagine that freedom of expression must not be applied to their enemies, and that’s exactly what Wood does. Wood…
The article that includes this graph is available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/college-football-player-value-2015-9?
The Taxable Compensation of the Presidents of the Largest Unions in the U.S.: In February 2014, the National Review published an article by Jim Geraghty titled “America’s Richest 2%: Union Presidents.” That article included the following paragraphs, heavily slanted to make the salaries sound outrageously disproportionate to what anyone in such leadership positions…