The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released its annual ranking of American colleges and universities. The ranking purport to reflect what students will learn at the institutions: specifically, whether they will be required to take core courses in composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics, and science. An article in the…
It is not the toothless grin of the jack-o’-lantern, a name that will give even the most fastidious punctuators among us a shiver with its strange hyphen and accent mark combination, that scares me. Nor is it the light of a candle that illuminates just how far we have come from traditions of centuries ago…
This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the…
Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Harper, 1912. Trained as a dentist, Grey had a practice in New York City from 1896 to 1904. But in 1907, he fulfilled a lifetime obsession and began a decade of travels throughout the American West. He used these experiences to lend immediacy to the…
The US Olympic Committee has selected Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Boston as finalists for the US bid for the 2024 Olympics, with a decision announced in 2017. While the pundits have already had their field day in the local press, the vast overruns that defined Sochi suggest that developed global cities with significant…
The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll. At the same time,…
In what may hopefully be a small sign that the tide could be turning against a corporate-funded K-12 school “reform” movement that thrives on autocratic administration and the denigration of veteran teachers, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has resigned at the request of the school board, The New York Times reports today. …
Back on January 2 of this year I posted to this blog a piece entitled “How NOT to Oppose the Academic Boycott of Israel.” As should be well known to readers, the AAUP takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does oppose all academic boycotts as a matter of principle. Hence, when the American…
I should have expected the exploitative nature of news coverage concerning Ebola. I don’t know why I thought the news media would offer an educational experience. Offerings on television and on websites have much in common with Shark Week and the coverage of the O.J. Simpson disaster. Watching a patient being transported from an airport…
Professor Steven Salaita on October 8, 2014 spoke at Columbia College Chicago that I previously commented on. John Dworkin asked the panelists, Steven Salaita, Iymen Chehade and myself whether we would consent to being taped and YouTubed: a neologism? Mr. Dworkin recently released on his YouTube channel videos of the three panelists. Here are parts one and…