Republican candidate-presumptive Mitt Romney recently blasted Barack Obama for suggesting that it takes more than an individual to build a country: To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John pizza, that Ray Kroc didn’t build McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build…
Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that he got a phone call during a break that revealed Barack Obama had the “lowest grades ever in Harvard, never went to class.” This, of course, is a complete lie.
When I teach my technical-writing students about executive summaries, I tell them to imagine that their boss is either too dumb or too hurried to look carefully at the material behind the summary. They laugh, but they get the point: the boss (who is probably smart, actually, and a good judge of time) doesn’t want…
Three years before publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1835, Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony (then not yet twenty), saw her Domestic Manners of the Americans reach print. It’s a delightful book, though not particularly kind to the people of the young republic. Nonetheless, Mrs. Trollope had quite the eye, and wit to match.
This is a guest post by Donna Potts, chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences and a professor of English at Kansas State University. On May 24, when the president of the University of Missouri, Tim Wolfe, announced plans to close the University of Missouri Press, my first reaction was deeply personal. I immediately…
By Marjorie Heins, founder, Free Expression Policy Project The current controversy over Yale University’s planned campus in Singapore is, at bottom, an argument over how much compromise on free speech is justified in exchange for the presumed benefits of locating branches of U.S. universities within authoritarian regimes. Although the champions of global ventures like Yale’s…
One of the interesting things about fishing in unknown waters is that you never quite know what will come up when you reel in the line. It has only been a few weeks since my first post here, but I am already getting intriguing responses. One on Tuesday follows my post with the tongue-in-cheek title Reminder…
The things we get most exciting about, the things we find most enticing and revolutionary, are also things most likely to be old–once you strip away the new skin. They are the familiar wrapped up in shiny new presentations. The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) are a case in point. When you look at them…
In the December 23, 1869 edition of The Nation, Francis Parkman wrote: The New England man of letters… was apt to be a recluse, ignorant of the world, bleached by a close room and an iron stove, never breathing the outer air when he could help it, and resembling a medieval monk in his scorn…
Ron Lipsman, a former senior associate dean at the University of Maryland, writes at Minding the Campus attacking tenure: “In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague.” This is nonsense. Plenty of tenured professors do get fired every year…