What I am about to recount did not occur on April Fool’s Day, but the story is in that vein. When I was in graduate school, another graduate teaching fellow asked me to participate in a hoax. In her freshman composition class, the assigned readings were the script of Orson Welles’s infamous radio dramatization of…
For April Fools Day, the Library of Congress has provided materials related to the following hoax to educators who wish to make use of their digital collections of primary sources: “April Fools Day pranks are usually fairly short term: An entire class simultaneously falls asleep or a teacher assigns a forty-page essay due the next…
Tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita, last night, filed a response to the University of Illinois motion to dismiss his civil rights lawsuit against the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois officials and donors. The response lays out the underlying constitutional, contractual and tort-based claims at the heart of the lawsuit and addresses how the complaint alleges…
In a review titled “The End of College? Not So Fast,” published by the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, Donald E. Heller provides a very thoughtful and substantive critique of Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. You may recall that I discussed Blaine Grateman’s review…
All day the talking heads on cable news have been debating whether the new Indiana law protecting “religious freedom” is actually a bill sanctioning biased treatment of LGBT individuals. A number Far-Right mouthpieces have tried to mount a defense of the law and of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whose inability either to provide any coherent…
While the notification date to college applicants varies dramatically depending upon the path selected for admission consideration, the notifications will largely be complete by April 1, even at the most selective schools. It’s at this point that the ball shifts to the applicant’s court. Until the notification, most of the applicant’s time, and corresponding anxieties,…
James Danko, president of Butler University, speaks out on the new Indiana “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA): While I have read a variety of opinions and rationale for RFRA, it strikes me as ill-conceived legislation at best, and I fear that some of those who advanced it have allowed their personal or political agendas to…
Corinthian Colleges have been forced to close their “doors.” As I reported in this blog several years ago, the Washington Post Corporation, which had derived between 50% and 60% of its annual profits from its ownership share of Kaplan University quietly sold off its stock just ahead of the formal release of the Harkin Report…
That’s how NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen responded to James O’Keefe in 2011. Given the context, it seemed an appropriate response. Personally, I was a little annoyed by the timing: My article on O’Keefe and fellow right-wing pseudo-journalist Andrew Breitbart was already complete and ‘typeset’ for News with a View: Essays on the Eclipse of Objectivity…
