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Back in the day, the president of Harvard stood up to an unaccountable, unAmerican, evil conspiracy. I also count Joseph Welch, a Harvard Law alum, (and coincidentally, another Iowa boy) as one of my heroes in the same national battle. Of course, the stakes then were limited: only the survival of American liberty and the [...]
Archive for the ‘Education policy’ Category
January 28th, 2012
January 25th, 2012
I missed this while it was happening, but it got some attention in the NYT today. New Hampshire has enacted a law that seems to give parents unilateral power to line-item veto their kids’ curriculum in public schools. The law looks like a can of worms, because the parents’ substitute material has to be “sufficient [...]
December 20th, 2011
At my company (less in my unit of it), teaching is basically treated as a tax you have to pay to do your research, and faculty are hired and promoted for research and encouraged to avoid this tax where possible; indeed, one of our principal recruitment gestures is a reduced teaching load for the first [...]
December 19th, 2011
Category: Education policy, Science and its methods
Kevin Drum channels Brad DeLong to recall a Calvin and Hobbes sequence in which Calvin’s dad reassures him that it’s colder in the winter because the earth is farther from the sun then than in the summer. Kevin asks for a survey to find out how many people believe that. As it happens, a small [...]
November 29th, 2011
The faculty senate meeting passed all four resolutions en bloc about 10:1, 336-34. The resolutions are here, here, here, and here. This morning, specific language of no confidence in the administration was removed from one of the resolutions by its sponsors so it wouldn’t appear to be a demand for resignation. I think the attendance, [...]
November 26th, 2011
Category: Education policy, Income distribution, Leadership, Management, Occupy Wall Street, Politics and Leadership, University of California
On Monday, the Berkeley faculty will have a special meeting to consider several resolutions condemning the police behavior at the Nov. 9 Occupy Cal demonstration, and another resolution that says in part: Therefore be it Resolved that the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has lost confidence in the ability of Chancellor Birgeneau, EVC Breslauer [...]
November 20th, 2011
When the Alameda County Sheriff’s cops suited up in their riot armor and, AFAIK with our campus officers , beat a bunch of our students and faculty with batons, my chancellor was in Shanghai setting up a branch campus; I don’t know who was nominally in charge and forgot to be in charge. When the [...]
November 20th, 2011
It has now been two weeks, and the PSU affair is still, almost universally, treated as a localized problem in a small town in Pennsylvania involving mistreatment of kids (not players, not students). But that’s not what the Penn State crisis is: Penn State is just the place where a much more pervasive sickmess was [...]
November 11th, 2011
Yesterday an OWS-affiliated (whatever that actually means) crowd tried to occupy what functions as a quad at Berkeley, with tents in which to stay a while. Campus police and Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies arrived in armor looking like Darth Vaders, cleared the tents away by force, pulled down signs, and brutalized a bunch of students [...]
November 1st, 2011
If you look up the term “anti-charismatic” in the new Oxford English multimedia dictionary, you get the left-side video in this Bloggingheads video. My friend Don Taylor, who teaches public policy at Duke, benefits from the comparison. Oh yeah. his terrific book “Balancing The Budget is a Progressive Priority” is available here.
