After a gunman opened fire last week at an Oregon community college, killing 9 and wounding 10, President Obama bemoaned the “routinization” of our response. Oregon, it must be noted, is one of seven states that now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses. Gun rights advocates like the NRA…
Each week during the NFL season, Business Insider publishes power rankings not just of the NFL teams but of the quarterbacks leading those teams. This fall, Business Insider has started publishing weekly power rankings of the presidential candidates, complete with the candidate’s polling averages nationally and in the earliest primary states, as well as an…
That’s the title of a thoughtful essay that appeared last week in the Boston College (BC) student newspaper, The Heights. Student Sean Sudol’s topic is student leadership. He begins with an expression of pride in one of his professor’s comments that to find leadership on a college campus you should look to student organizations, but…
Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor at Tufts University, has been a professor of German, Judaic studies and biblical literature and is a former provost of Tufts. In an article that first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine, and is now available on the web under the title “Tenure:…
This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…
Today is the publication of Steven Salaita’s new book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books). Salaita’s book is smart, charming, funny, intense, civil, and sincere—and it’s a powerful argument for just how wrong the University of Illinois trustees were to fire him. Salaita’s book may not persuade those who supported…
This photo was originally posted on Pinterest, and it has, as they say, gone viral: And if you happen to live in or are visiting a big city such as New York, this clever bit of American ingenuity may just keep the rats from dragging off your pizza slices when you’re not looking: Oh, and,…
But, on the plus side, I am less than ten years from retirement. This is the beginning of a fairly lengthy article that appeared in yesterday’s Dayton Daily News: “Experts say Wright State University’s use of a work visa program to bring in low-cost foreign workers for jobs at area private companies typifies…
Of all the responses to Arne’s Duncan’s announced resignation from the Department of Education, Diane Ravitch’s has the most succinct and incisive: “In the car yesterday, I heard a report that Arne Dyncan was stepping down. President Obama said: He did more than anyone else to bring American education into the 21at century, sometimes kicking…
Something has happened to the way I read scholarly articles. Unless I can sense a person behind the words, I drift off. No more “objectivity” for me, thank you. Give me the same information, but let me know who is providing it, and why I should trust them. This is beginning to prove to be…