Recently, the New Statesman ran a short piece on a study that tracked the majors of millionaires by the baccalaureate and graduate degrees that they have completed [http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2013/10/top-ten-university-degrees-taken-millionaires]. The ten most popular degrees among this select group were reported as follows: 1. Engineering 2. MBA 3. Economics 4. Law 5. Business Administration
In August 2013, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones described the sinkhole at Bayou Corne as “the biggest ongoing disaster in the United State that you haven’t heard of.” That was already a year after the sinkhole had first appeared. Writing for the Daily Kos, Jen Hayden offered the following overview: “One night in August 2012,…
The Board of Regents at Texas A&M have selected Mark Hussey as Interim President of the University System. Hussey has served as a Vice Chancellor at the institution and as Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Governor Rick Perry, an alumnus of the Texas A&M, had expressed his preference for another candidate…
Some one once asked me what a president does all day. They thought, like so many others, that presidents held out tin cups traveling the world searching for alumni with money. I replied that presidents are better thought of as King Solomon determining how to divide the baby. They behave most days as nineteenth century…
What follows is a list of U.S. states by GDP and GDP per capita in 2010. The “right to work” states are indicated in boldface. Rank GDP Pct. of US Pop. GDP Per Rank Per Total GDP (000’s) GDP (Millions) Capita Capita United States 14,657,800 100.00 308.7 47,482 1 California 1,936,400 13.34 37.3 51,914 11…
What follows is the opening section of J. M. Coetzee’s Foreword to a new book by John Higgins, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa. Coetzee is, of course, a very highly regarded South African novelist, whose honors include the Nobel Prize for Literature. Higgins is a professor at the University of Cape Town. The…
Jeff Gundlach is the CEO of Doubleline Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. He was previously the star performer for another firm, the Trust Company of the West (TCW), where he managed the Total Return Bond Fund. He left TCW in a very public, law-suit spawning spectacle of mutual accusations of self-interested impropriety. Still, the…
One of the dangers of the over-reliance on (some would say “abuse of” and I would not argue) adjuncts and other contingent hires is that it creates a pressure-cooker environment for those particular teachers, one that sometimes explodes–as it did yesterday for adjunct and Slate contributor Rebecca Schuman. Writing, putatively, about student essays and whether or not they…
In late October, Federal prosecutors in El Paso, Texas, formally charged Marco Antonio Delgado with conspiring to launder $600 million in drug profits for the Mexican Milenio Cartel. Delgado was a prominent attorney and known in El Paso and beyond as a generous philanthropist. The investigation that led authorities to Delgado began in 2007 when…
Published by AlterNet, C. J. Werleman’s “Look at the Stats: America Resembles a Poor Country” presents a succinct survey of data that suggests that the American Dream is becoming an ever more remote possibility for more and more Americans. Here is an excerpt from the article [the full text of which can be found at…