Faculty Lounge

With literacy on all levels (i.e., without adjectives or with—scientific, historical, civic, etc.) on the wane, public officials everywhere scratch their heads over what to do about it while concocting schemes such as the one devised by the school board in the city Tony Bennett sings about.

While academics lecture the rest of us about diversity, all is not well in their own temples of tolerance.

The Bush Administration’s education reforms doubled education spending but not test scores or graduation rates. The Obama Administration’s proposals might make No Child Left Behind look like school choice.

Every now and then we can get some much needed clarity from academia. “Nowadays, the unemployment rate equals the number of unemployed persons divided by the total civilian labor force, which itself adds the number of people who are employed to the number of unemployed,” William F. Shughart II writes in the Spring issue of The Independent.

Farms and ranches in California might be going out of business due to environmental zeal in protecting so-called endangered species, many of which are easier to find than factories. That doesn’t stop one school from partnering with the federal government to promote the Endangered Species Act.

Educators and their benefactors might ponder what good computers are when students can’t read what’s on the screen.

This week the Huffington Post launched its “College” section. One section of the site focuses on “Majoring in Debt” and provides stories from college students about their experiences with student loan debt.

In the real world, businesses expand when profits do. In academia, colleges and universities, such as George Washington University, just expand.

A school district in suburban Philadelphia gave out MacBook laptops to “all high school students” which contained a security feature allowing the school to remotely activate the laptops’ webcams, Lower Merion School District Superintendent Dr. Christopher McGinley admitted yesterday.

Employers may have “shed,” as the Washington Post put it, 20,000 jobs in January alone but, fear not, the “green economy” will replace a fraction of them, with universities poised to make the delivery.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., showed why he is one of the educated elite when he pointed out that the record snowstorm that hit the Capital should not deter lawmakers from doing something about global warming.

Could the problem with the unemployment rate in the United States be that it affects the wrong people?