Here is a current map of Florida: Here, in contrast is a map of what will be left of Florida if the polar ice caps continue to melt: So the revelations over this past week that Florida Governor Rick Scott has prohibited state employees from using the term “climate change” are fairly astounding on multiple…
Remarks U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez, Induction of Senator Edward M. Kennedy Into the Department of Labor Hall of Honor, Washington, D.C., March 12, 2015 [as prepared for delivery] Thank you, Chris. Mrs. Kennedy, Teddy, Patrick, Secretary Brock, Secretary Herman, friends, colleagues, thank you so much for joining us today. I looked…
In an earlier post this week, I provided the legislative testimony that was presented by Gavin DeVore Leonard, the Director of One Ohio Now, on the proposed biennial budget for Ohio. One Ohio Now is just one of the groups with which the Ohio Conference of AAUP has become allied. Another is the Ohio Student…
Here are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Natalie Schulhof for the Fourth Estate, the student newspaper at George Mason University: “Garett Jones, associate economics professor at George Mason University, says that there should be less democracy in the United States, according to a talk he gave on Feb. 24. “Jones says that…
Andrew Bacevich, political-science professor at Boston University, has posted a new essay, “Rationalizing Lunacy: The Intellectual as Servant of the State.” It’s a look back at the role of the public intellectual within the U.S. federal government since the time of the New Deal, focusing particularly on their impact on foreign policy, the Vietnam War in specific…
Alice Dreger has a new post on Retraction Watch. She writes What are we to do? Well, I believe we as university-based researchers should at least be quite concerned when academics have to worry about being “off-brand.” We should, I think, be pretty agitated when a university professor has to pay $50,000 to defend his academic…
I subscribe to a number of newsletters related to online education. They very seldom include articles that question increased institutional investments in digital technology. So this one caught my attention. Writing for eCampus, Meris Stansbury surveys studies that have addressed the question of “How to Calculate the Real Cost of MOOCs.” It turns out that…
I was drafting this post before I read John Wilson’s post on the same topic. So I have re-framed this as less of a stand-alone piece and more as a follow-up to his post. I agree that the students should not have been expelled. If they were not expelled, they would very likely have decided…
American copyright laws are absurd. Weird Al Yankovic, in “Word Crimes,” can parody Robin Thicke’s (with Pharrell) “Blurred Lines” but Thicke and Pharrell cannot base their own song on songs of the past without an explicit financial relationship. In other words, their creativity is controlled by money, as was affirmed by a jury yesterday: As…