forbiddencomma

Tag: college

  • Time to reform the presidential debates.

    Wednesday was a bad night. It was the night America’s circus-show model of presidential debates proved a mockery, as CNBC’s hosts threw out nothing but one “gotcha” question after another, without any pretense of trying to be fair and unbiased. Granted, conservatives never tire of complaining about media bias, so their complaints may be taken with…

  • The poor get poorer: college edition

    I recommend this Michelle Goldberg article from last month’s Nation about the conservative war on higher education, and its resulting widening of income inequality. This accomplishes two Republican goals. One is, of course, sticking it to a traditional Democratic constituency. Fewer English professors earning a paycheck means fewer dollars going to the DNC, after all.…

  • Anti-intellectualism and the college campus

    The greatest advancement of Western culture was not electricity or antibiotics or the computer, but the movement to which the discoverers of each owed a great debt: the Enlightenment. To oversimplify a bit, this was a grouping of philosophies that rejected magical thinking, encouraged debate, celebrated reason, and promoted individualism as a check on mindless…