Ever since the American Studies Association announced in mid-December that its membership had voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, criticism of the organization’s action has snowballed. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education the “Association has itself become the target of widespread criticism and ostracism. It has gone from relative obscurity to prominence…
This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________ Several years after publishing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was abashed to discover that he had…
Here’s a Reuters photo of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford explaining how he has turned being mayor of one of the world’s major cities into a vaudeville act.
At the start of each new year for the last twenty to twenty-five years, I have made the same two resolutions: to be on time and to lose weight. Since I am almost never on time and since I keep gaining weight, I think that one of the following conclusions can be drawn from this…
Statement by the University of Colorado at Boulder chapter of the AAUP The University of Colorado chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) joins our Colorado Conference and our national association in condemning the University of Colorado’s assault on the reputation and academic freedom of sociology professor Patricia Adler. University officials have publicly…
The first post in this series is available at: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/15/remarks-in-response-to-a-bond-traders-case-for-drastically-reducing-federal-debt-in-63-charts-part-1/ Here is an excerpt from that post to re-establish the context; you can skip to the end of the italicized part if you read and recall the initial post: Jeff Gundlach is the CEO of Doubleline Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. He was previously…
There are many signs that the slow economic recovery may finally be picking up some steam. Economists are forecasting 4% growth for 2014. Both the official and the actual unemployment numbers have been declining, albeit very incrementally, month after month and are finally approaching levels that could be impacted meaningfully by targeted jobs programs—if, of…
Last year, Paul Broun, a congressman from Georgia, was the featured speaker at a Sportsman’s Banquet at a Baptist church. I’m not sure what the keynote speakers at those banquets usually talk about, but Broun used his time at the microphone to observe, infamously, that embryology, evolution, and the Big Bang Theory are “lies straight…
This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________ In 1990, Spanish philosopher Jon Perez Laraudogoitia submitted an article to Mind entitled “This Article Should Not…
Today’s graduate students are caught in the swirl of several current trends that, if unchanged, lead toward a difficult future for them and for higher education. As students, they shoulder their share of the growing $1 billion in student loan debt and the daunting problems that burden carries. As the next generation of higher ed…