After this past week’s penultimate episode, it is clear that the crime that set much of the current action in motion occurred two decades earlier. During the 1992 L.A. race riots, several corrupt Vinci police officers committed an armed robbery of a jewelry store, with the most conspicuous loot being a set of exquisite blue…
On July 9, 2015, the AAUP sent a letter to Louisiana State University (LSU) President and Chancellor Dr. F. King Alexander indicating that a supplemental report to the public record relating to the LSU administration’s existing presence on the AAUP’s censure list had been authorized. This letter came in response to the administration’s dismissal of Associate Professor…
This post is being written as much in response to chhanks’ comment on Hank Reichman’s post, excerpting Vincent J. Roscingo’s article in Counterpunch, as to the post itself. In the comment, chhanks asks: “Can anyone at the AAUP tells what percentage of current university and college administrators were tenured faculty members before becoming administrators?” With…
Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
The National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog has yet another entry in its seeming endless series of posts predicting the imminent doom of academia. Like the world’s worst psychics, the conservative movement keeps declaring its certainty that higher education is a “bubble” and on the verge of annihilation. In reality, there is no bubble in…
Over the past three to four decades, Bill Cosby has received honorary degrees from the following 23 institutions that, to date, have not rescinded the degrees: Baylor University Bennett College Boston University Carnegie Mellon Colgate University Drew University Fordham University Haverford College Marquette University Oberlin College Paine College Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Sisseton Wahpeton College Swarthmore…
Yesterday, my wife and I drove to Columbus, Ohio, for the annual Dublin Irish Festival held in the suburb at the northwest corner of the I-270 beltway around the Columbus metro area. It is a festival that lives up to its advertising, with all sorts of great Celtic music and great food (Irish and otherwise)—as…
On July 30, Cathy O’Neil posted an article titled “The Manufactured Trucker Shortage” on her mathbabe blog. She opens the article with a quotation from an article in the Wall Street Journal that raises some alarm over the current shortage of long-distance trucker drivers, estimated to be about 30,000 drivers, and, worse, the projected shortage…
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…