It can’t be a good thing when a state fires its head of science education for promoting science education. But that’s what happened when the Texas Education Agency put its science curriculum director Chris Comer on administrative leave in late October, leading to what she calls a forced resignation.
We begin our story on October 26 when Comer forwarded an e-mail announcing a presentation titled, “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse,” by Barbara Forrest. Forrest co-authored a book arguing that creationist politics are advancing the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools, and are doing so through public relations rather than through scientific research. Shortly after forwarding the e-mail, Comer was put on administrative leave.
What are college students most likely doing on their computers if they’re up at 3:30 a.m.? Probably wasting time on Facebook. (Or perhaps blogging about Facebook as I am now.) College presidents should probably try to kick that habit.
Dr. Janet Dudley-Eschbach, President of Salisbury University in Maryland, has been getting some heat after posting pictures from her family vacation on her Facebook profile. From a WBOC-TV report:
Among those was a picture of Dudley-Eshbach pointing a stick toward her daughter and a Hispanic man.
The caption underneath the picture reads that Eshbach had to “beat off the Mexicans because they were constantly flirting with my daughter."
Another picture shows an animal, a tapir, and has a caption referring to the large size of the animal's genitalia.
The president has issued a statement noting that she’s taken down her profile. Shame we can’t all poke the president.
This summer we were all talking about the scandal at Eastern Michigan University, where university officials attempted to cover up the rape and murder of a student. Quick update in the story came yesterday when the former president, John A. Fallon, sued EMU, charging it violated the state’s whistleblower protection law when it fired him in July, according to a story in The Ann Arbor News. I’m no expert on this one, but I have no sympathy for a guy who was complicit in covering up a heinous crime, telling the parents of Lauren Dickinson, the raped and murdered student, that she’d died of a heart problem. Not only immoral and illegal, but also would seem to be ignoring a duty to let students know about what’s going on in their community, potentially putting them at greater risk of suffering a similar fate as Dickinson.
The students who canvassed GW’s campus with anti-Muslim posters Monday sent a letter to the GW Hatchet today admitting their role in the controversy.
We’d all realized that the posters were a satirical shot at Campus Progress’ archenemy, the Young America’s Foundation, which is sponsoring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week at 140 campuses around the country from October 22-26, including GW where Campus Progress’ other archenemy David Horowitz will be speaking. But at least now we know who the students responsible for the posters were. One was Adam Kokesh, “a graduate student and Iraq War veteran, [who] gained celebrity over the past year because of his vocal opposition to the war.”
Kokesh and six other students wrote in an e-mail to the Hatchet:
"It is to our great dismay that the student body and the media missed the clear, if subtle, message of our flier: the hyperbolic nature of the flier was aimed at exposing Islamophobic racism.
There’s still a great debate raging on Jenny Odegard’s original blog post on this Monday about whether this satire is funny, whether racism is ever funny, and shitting on Paris Hilton.
Tomorrow is the big anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. which you’ve hopefully by now seen signs for on your college campus. The protest, organized by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), begins with a rally near the White House, continues with a march to the U.S. Capitol, and concludes with a “die-in” that organizers estimate will involve approximately 1,000 people lying down near the Capitol in a symbolic effort to represent dead U.S. soldiers and dead Iraqis.
To get you pumped for the action, I thought I’d belatedly share some photos from the last anti-war event I attended, a “Take A Stand Town Hall” co-sponsored by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq and MoveOn.org. The event was targeted at Senator Specter who “chose to stand with President Bush and his reckless Iraq war policy instead of his constituents” by failing to attend. (The organizers left an empty chair on the panel to remind the audience of Specter’s absence.)
My life just hasn’t been the same since the Campus Progress Free-Food-A-Thon this summer. Something’s been missing. Not the sirloin steak, per se, but rather the fact that the sirloin steak was free. There’s an indescribable feeling I get eating a meal I didn’t pay a dime for. Apparently I’m not the only one. An article about freegans, “a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste” is creeping its way to the top of the Los Angeles Times most-emailed list. You don’t have to read far to get graphic. Here’s the lede:
For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.
The passage about freegans carefully sifting through garbage outside D'Agostino's supermarket in Midtown Manhattan really transported me to another place. My happy place.
"Whoa, someone found the soy milk!" said Cindy Rosin, 31, a freelance graphics designer. "Good find."
I’ve spent a large part of the last two weeks in the Admissions Office gearing up for this year’s admissions cycle. My actual work has been focused on setting up the Student Ambassadors program, an effort to reach out to low-income students by sending Yale students to high schools in their area during breaks that we’ve identified as having a number of high achiever but that don’t traditionally get visited by admissions officers from selective schools like Yale. The University supports the initiative because it helps attract “diamonds in the rough,” increasing the number of low-income students at Yale, but there is of course a larger social benefit: the program addresses the fact that low-income students often don't have guidance counselors walking them through the admissions process or parents paying for SAT courses and helping them apply for scholarships and financial aid. While Ambassadors give presentations on Yale, they usually end up answering more broad questions about admissions and financial aid and often become mentors to the students they visit, guiding them through the application process.
Jim Downie and Kay Steiger each wrote great articles (see the front of CampusProgress.org or click their names) catching us up on the two years since Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans. Jim’s crib sheet sums up just how little progress has been made and notes that the Army Corps of Engineers charged with rebuilding the levees seem to be “repeating many of the same mistakes that plagued earlier levees” despite all the money and control they’ve been given. Kay reminds us that Katrina hit communities of color extra hard and brings our attention to issues like domestic violence which often get overlooked while city officials and the media focus on lack of schools and hospitals.
I have little to add to the discussion, so I’ll just urge you all to download the song that never seems to get out of my head whenever I read anything Katrina-related, “Georgia…Bush” by Lil Wayne. Here’s a photo montage some YouTuber put together that accompanies the song:
John Ashbery, one of the most celebrated poets of our time, will be named the first poet laureate of mtvU today. I’ll admit I’ve never read anything by Ashbery, but maybe that makes me the target audience of mtvU’s new laureate program, which Ashbery hopes will “broaden the audience for poetry.”
Today MySpace and MTV announced the details of the presidential candidate forums they will hold this fall. Hosted on college campuses across the country, broadcast on MTV and streamed live on MySpace, the forums seek to foster “candid, unfiltered” discussions between young voters and the major Republican and Democratic candidates.
As I write in an identical blog post at HuffPo, the blogosphere seems abuzz with optimism about the forums, the latest evidence that 2008 won’t be your mother and father’s election. “MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums,” writes Michael Connery, co-founder of Future Majority, a prominent blog with well-done reporting on progressive youth politics. (Yes, that Mike Connery who came at Campus Progress back in June.)
The number of murder victims this year in my beloved city of Philadelphia climbed to 264 over the weekend, keeping the city well above pace to break last year’s mark of 406. In Philly most folks are united in lobbying for stronger gun control laws, but local politicians are essentially powerless since legislators at the state and federal level are beholden to the powerful gun lobby.
After being the subject of many a Campus Progress blog post, it’s only fitting that the release of M.I.A.’s second album, Kala, which drops today be announced here. I was gonna say something like “I’m bout to go run to the store and grab a copy now!” but that would be a lie. I been had that bootleg all summer.
Jim D commented earlier that today was the day we’ve all been waiting: the day the U.S. News and World Report rankings come out. Well I’m tired of this shit. Not because I’m tired of Yale always being No. 3. Not because I’m tired of watching helicopter parents drive their children to anxiety overload. I’m sick of the rankings undermining American competitiveness by incentivizing institutional behavior that privileges the privileged, undermines equality and fairness, and diverts schools’ priorities from educating students to fudging figures. Am I just ranting here? Maybe. But I try to back it up with some more meat in my op-ed on the Huffington Post today. Check it out. Beef up the comments section at HuffPo with some CP love.
First we heard about corruption in financial aid offices where university administrators compromised the interests of students by taking bribes from lenders. Now we learn about similar shenanigans in study abroad offices. An article in yesterday’s NY Times, which quickly shot to the top of the “most e-mailed articles” list, highlighted a number of potential conflicts of interest in the relationships between university officials and third-party study abroad providers, including “free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees.”
I just returned from sunny California where the state’s in a bit of a budget crisis. I spent most of my time drinking fresherboba and eatingyakitori with more obscure body parts than you can find on the East Coast. But I took a few seconds from consuming here and there to talk politics (although it was mostly about the mayor’s affair with a reporter, his bodyguard manhandling a reporter, or a number of other politicians’ political pratfalls). Among the proposals floating around to close the budget deficit – mostly cutting funding for a cocktail of social services – none seemed as outside-the-boxy as one I heard today after I returned to D.C.
If you’re like what I imagine to be the typical Campus Progress reader – a politically-conscious student engaged in important issues on campus –Inside Higher Ed’s series on “students and campus leadership” is worth a peek. One of the articles is by Justin Elliott, a 2007 Brown grad whose article on university ties to slavery ran on CampusProgress.org.
Right-wing radio hosts keep on getting invited to private meetings with the president. After having Hannity & Co. over last year, he brought his old friends back yesterday. These guys are pretty ubiquitous as it is with corporate-owned, conservative mouthpiece radio stations dominating the airwaves, but Bush can’t seem to get enough of ‘em so he keeps bringing them down to the Oval Office for off-the-record tea parties.
The last time Dick Cheney went on Larry King Live he proclaimed the insurgency in Iraq was in “last throes,” so when I heard the veep would be back for another interview tonight, I got my popcorn out and prepared for some entertaining lies and high-quality misleading of the public.
After Thomas Coen said Wesleyan was “the most accepting school” of alternative lifestyles [Update: I put these words in his mouth. He was, however, hyping up Wesleyan.], I did some research to put his alma mater to the test. I knew that the Connecticut school was a bastion of tolerance and political correctness from my friends there who told me they write essays with gender-neutral pronouns. Campus Progress’ resident Wesleyan grads, Thomas and Ben Adler, reinforced that image by unflinchingly rattling off an “endless acronym” of sexually dissonant identities: “LGBTTQQFAGIPBDSM, etc.,” which stands for Lesbian, Gay , Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderqueer, Intersex, Polyamourous, BDSM (bondage/ disciple, dominance/ submission, sadism/ masochism), and everything we might have forgotten.
But is Wesleyan really the most gay-friendly school in the country? According to the Princeton Review, it’s the sixteenth.
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