The following thread comes from Appalnet, the Appalachian Studies listserv (slightly edited), May, 2014: Colleagues, if you read the following on your institutional discussion board in reference to a complaint about a barefoot student, how would you respond to the professor? “My approach would be to assure this student that going barefoot is not against…
Amherst College, which banned fraternities and sororities in 1984, has now taken this an alarming step further: starting July 1, any students participating in an unofficial fraternity or sorority will be punished, and could be expelled. A college has the right to ban fraternities only in the sense of refusing to recognize gender-biased exclusive social…
Over his career, Jim Tressel won twelve national coach of the year awards as a head football coach at the Division 1 and 1AA levels. After serving as an assistant coach at the University of Akron and Ohio State, as well as elsewhere, he was named the head football coach at Youngstown State University. From…
Christopher Kennedy, chair of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, has given an interview to a local newspaper in which he explains why he believes that adjunct instructor James Kilgore must be fired for his involvement in the 1970s radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Kilgore served time in prison for possessing explosives and…
Thanks to a post on Retraction Watch, I just read an essay by University of Michigan’s Gerald Davis, “Why Do We Still Have Journals?” He concludes: there is room for many kinds of contributions, and it is reasonable for journals and other kinds of outlets to have a division of labor. But it is worth being cognizant…
It has been a decade since I’ve been in Africa, almost a quarter of a century since I lived there. But I did spend two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer working in agriculture in northern Togo and two as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. I learned a great…
The e-mail that I am reproducing below has just been disseminated by “Making Change at Walmart,” the employee organization that is trying to pressure Walmart into providing more of its employees with living wages and decent benefits. It serves to reinforce my ongoing complaints about the Obama administration’s seeming obliviousness to the messages that it…
It’s been a bit more than two months since I’ve posted on the continuing conflict between faculty, staff, and students at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which has threatened to revoke CCSF’s accreditation on what many — including San Francisco’s City Attorney and other…
This is my fourth post on Bobby Jindal in the past month or two. I don’t believe that this focus on him represents some sort of undue obsession with him or a vendetta against him. Instead, I think that I have coincidentally and simply become more aware of what has been occurring in Louisiana under…