Rudy Fichtenbaum has sent me the following statistical analysis in response to the assertions made by Campos in the article in the New York Times and as a follow-up to my own post on that article. I don’t think that anything that Rudy points out in this analysis substantially contradicts anything that I have asserted…
In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, Paul F. Campos has offered his opinion on “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much.” [The whole piece is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0] Campos argues that attributing the rise in tuition costs to reductions in state funding is a fairy tale that administrators have been…
Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass. New York: Knopf, 1937. Conrad Richter is best known for his Awakening Land trilogy about the settlement of the Ohio frontier: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950). But Richter’s earliest stories and novels were set on the later and very different frontier of the…
The discussion of the “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas, and elsewhere has been seriously skewed by a failure to look very much, if at all, beyond the specific examples offered to justify the laws. This issue is not really about Christian fundamentalist florists or restaurant owners having to provide services to gay couples who…
The Progressive news site Nation of Change has today run an article titled “Four Charts with What Everyone Should Know about the Student Debt Crisis.” The full article is available at: http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/04/04/four-charts-with-what-everyone-should-know-about-the-student-debt-crisis/ I think that the most telling of the charts may be this one, which shows the incredible increase in government-backed student debt: The…
The University of South Carolina has suspended a student, apparently for writing the N-word on a white board in a study room on campus, revealed in a photo that was posted online: This controversy has attracted attention not merely on campus and in the community, but also nationwide and even on the NBC Nightly News.…
Benjamin Franklin includes this list in his 1731 “Apology for Printers”: I request all who are angry with me on the Account of printing things they don’t like, calmly to consider these following Particulars That the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces; an Observation general enough to become a common Proverb,…
A colleague sent me a link to the following post at Fighting against Casualisation in Education, a UK site promoting activism among contingent faculty. The actual post appears to be taken largely from the site of the University of Warwick. I am assuming that most of you, like me, will have little or no familiarity…
This past week the Oregon legislature passed and the governor of that state signed legislation that would automatically register to vote every citizen with a driver’s license issued by the state. I was going to write a post contrasting that law with a late amendment to Ohio’s transportation bill that would have required people from…