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…
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…