Item 4 Marking the National Rifle Association’s 2015 Freedom Festival in Nashville Some truisms, even about guns, turn out to be true. In January 2013, a security guard in Trinidad and Tobago accidentally shot off his penis with an illegal gun. The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reported that the 33-year-old man was carrying a…
Is this what it is like to be making a mess of your life? Where does it all lead? Can one turn that mess around? Those of us who teach in community colleges and at the lower end of American university hierarchies face students asking these questions daily. That’s not surprising: We often encounter people…
Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California system recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which she argued that, despite the challenges created by unprecedented cuts in state support for public higher education, it is a gross exaggeration to assert that American higher education is in crisis. Scott H. Levine,…
This past week, Bill O’Reilly cited, for the second time, statistics that supposedly show that more Whites than African-Americans are killed by police. Although he framed the discussion of these statistics by stating that he was in no way condoning the recent police shooting of an unarmed African-American man in North Charleston, South Carolina, he…
In discussing and charting the dramatic shift from state support to tuition as the major revenue source for public colleges and universities, we typically focus on national or state-by-state data. But we can also chart that data for individual institutions. For example, here is such a chart for Pennsylvania State University: The advantage of considering…
This is a carefully prepared, persuasive, and at times eloquent speech. It would have been nice if such speeches had been given more consistently at the beginning of the Obama presidency, instead of at the tail end of it, and if they had reflected a broader and louder political focus on protecting and promoting labor rights.…
Now that the dust is settling on “March Madness,” all that is left to do is to count the money—the revenues generated by and those spent on “dreams of glory.” In a recent post, I included the following chart: it show what college basketball players would earn, on average and team by team, if they…
Laura Loomer, a student at Barry University, was suspended on Monday. Her crime? Embarrassing the university, by recording an undercover video for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas in which she duped employees into expressing support for her forming a pro-ISIS student group. What Loomer did was sleazy and dishonest. She took advantage of the fact that…
“Publish or perish” is a common expression in academia. PhD holders must achieve the required number of publications between the time of appointment to a tenure-track position and turning in the dossier to the Promotion and Tenure committee or risk restarting a grueling job search. The stress that this pressure to publish induces has brought…
After the 1980 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan headed for Philadelphia, Mississippi where he affirmed his commitment to states’ rights. There was nothing overtly racial about his speech, but the “dog whistle” was heard: It was near Philadelphia that three civil-rights workers had been murdered in 1964 at the height of a movement whose success came…