This announcement was distributed on our university’s faculty and staff listserves earlier today. I know that these seminars should probably make me feel more protected and secure, but they seem to provide, at best, a very odd and somehow unsettling note on which to begin the new academic year. I wonder if participants are expected…
On the heels of passing some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in the nation, the North Carolina legislature has just passed a revision of the state’s voting laws that, unarguably, makes it more difficult for many voters to exercise their right to vote. The new law requires photo-ID’s of all voters, regardless of whether…
What follows is the brief summary of a news story by Quinn Ford written originally for DNAinfo Chicago. The summary was published in HuffPost Chicago. xxxxxxx COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A Little Village gang member is being held on $20,000 bail after he admitted to police he was hiding a loaded gun in his…
This letter is a statement by the business community to articulate its broad support of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) [www.nextgenscience.org]. Such endorsements are essential in convincing legislators that science standards cannot be held hostage to extremist groups who have an antipathy toward science that is almost medieval—whose mistrust of science is rooted in…
At this time of the summer, when members of Congress return to their districts for town hall meetings often dominated by very vocal and very belligerent “Tea Party” activists, it is refreshing to see education officials in a conservative state resist pressures to make scientific standards conform to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Last week, the Kentucky…
This article was originally posted on Raging Chicken Press. I will be posting a series of articles about the incoming chancellor, Frank Brogan, in the upcoming weeks. Last week the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) Board of Governors chose Frank Brogan to become the next Chancellor of the 14 public university system. Brogan…
One of the favorite rhetorical devices of those on the Far Right is to take a charge leveled against them by progressives, to co-opt the language used to articulate that charge, and then to reframe the debate with the co-opted language so that it seems that the logic of their position is not just credible…
Today the U.S. Department of Education released a letter to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the agency that revoked accreditation for San Francisco City College. The letter came in response to a complaint filed by the California Federation of Teachers. The short version: ACCJC now has a year to “take immediate…
Internships used to be a way for students to gain some practical experience in their fields before they actually graduated and entered the job market. In most cases, interns worked on special projects directly related to their areas of study or assisted people with advanced positions within their prospective fields. In many cases, the internships…
Cultural Representations of Higher Ed, No. 8 I am working backwards through this list. Here are films 1 to 50. The rankings are my own and in most cases somewhat arbitrary. The descriptions of the films are paraphrases of summaries found in a half-dozen print and online film guides. I compiled the list about a…