Despite the evolving interpretation offered by state and federal courts, American higher education as a community remains committed in its support to increase diversity among students. At the same time, however, our colleges and universities largely fail to link diversity initiatives to specific workforce needs. This tendency often applies philosophically to all students enrolled, fueled…
Barbara Bowen, President of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York (CUNY), sent this message to union members yesterday: Dear Colleague: The results of the referendum of No Confidence in Pathways are in: 92% voted No Confidence in Pathways. The vote is a stunning rebuke to the Pathways…
Investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld’s 2012 book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power draws on thirty years of research and three hundred thousand pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to tell the story of the FBI’s covert operations in Berkeley during the 1960s. Focusing on…
This item has appeared on the website of KAIT in Jonesboro, Arkansas: “Arkansas State University is yet another institution to opt out of the new state gun law. The board of trustees met Thursday to discuss the proposal that would allow faculty and staff to carry concealed handguns on campus under the law. “The University of…
Although this year’s commencement addresses by President and Mrs. Obama have been inspiring, engaging, and often humorous—as was Jon Lovett’s, my favorite commencement address, hands down, is one written by Robert Reich to last year’s graduates–but never meant to be delivered in person. It has been reproduced on a fairly large number of progressive blogs,…
On May 23, the Century Foundation Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal released an important new study describing how best to strengthen community colleges to achieve socioeconomic mobility for more Americans. Led by co-chairs Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library and former president of Amherst College,…
Guns on Campus, Discouraging News, Addendum 1 The cable news networks, like the newspapers long before them, have turned “tabloid” coverage of crimes and trials into a staple element of their programming. It may have started with the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, but, if the recent ratings for the coverage of the Jodi…
Jon Lovett, a speechwriter for President Obama, addressed the graduates of Pitzer College on “fighting the culture of bullshit.” What follows is a brief selection from a fuller partial transcript of his commencement address provided through The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/life-lessons-in-fightingthe-culture-of-bullshit/276030/. ************************* One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning it.…
In an earlier post, “A Rhetoric of Demonization and Exclusion” [https://academeblog.org/2013/05/23/a-rhetoric-of-demonization-and-exclusion/], I discussed the lunatic-fringe rhetoric of the GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Bishop D.W. Jackson. That post included a re-post of a post to Right-Wing Watch, which drew on public pronouncements by Jackson that have been reported in the print media or…
Full text of “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’,” by Dennis Upper, from the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Fall 1974: