From October, 1985 to July, 1987, I taught at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in American Studies and Literature. It was an interesting–and sometimes frightening–time. Two years before I arrived, a leftist firebrand from the Upper Volta (the name of the country at the time) military named Thomas…
By Marjorie Heins, Free Expression Policy Project The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are best-known for donating millions to the election campaigns of Tea Party candidates and others committed to fighting regulation of business and to protecting the oil and gas industries from efforts to combat climate change. It turns out that Charles Koch, through…
Unfortunately, online education, or its include-all moniker “online,” tends to be lined up against face-to-face or classroom instruction, as if the two were gunfighters. Even if in the minds of some one of the parties walks away the victor, that party has more than the usual shoulder or arm wound than that of the winner…
In September I posted a piece entitled “The Kids Are All Right!” in which I praised high school students in Jefferson County, Colorado, who staged mass walkouts to protest a plan by their right-wing school board to establish a curriculum-review committee to not only respond to an allegedly “leftist” AP framework but to promote patriotism,…
Last week, Robin Meade won a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning a district court decision that had dismissed her lawsuit against Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. By Robin Meade The police chief handed me the envelope stating he had no idea what was in it, he was just…
For several years, the media has highlighted the importance of capital campaigns to relieve the financial burden at many colleges and universities. In doing so, they focus on the scale at the largest research universities where these campaigns now approach $5 billion in announced campaign goals. In doing so, they also typically set the campaign…
After the 2012 presidential election, it became apparent that Mitt Romney was very surprised that he lost the election because his internal polling had indicated that he was not just ahead, but solidly ahead, in most of the key battleground states. Progressives found that disconnection from reality quite amusing and attributed it, in Bill Maher’s…
The following post was written by Isaiah J. Poole for for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Riger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for…
The most important paragraph in Isaiah Poole’s piece seems to me to be the following: “Here’s where the tragedy of Tuesday’s election results come into sharp relief. Republicans were more successful than Democrats in tapping into voters’ economic anxiety, even with their record of blocking the policy changes needed to address the causes of that…
In an earlier post, “The Koch Brothers Gifts to Higher Ed Come with Many Strings Attached” [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/18/the-koch-brothers-gifts-to-higher-ed-come-with-many-strings-attached/], I discussed the decision by Brooklyn College to decline a gift from the Koch Brothers Foundation. To all appearances, it is one of the few colleges to have made such a decision. A former colleague once said that…