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Witch hunt for words
Note: this first appeared as a column in the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) January 8, 2026. When the Arizona Board of Education voted December 8 to remove anything smacking of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from our Structured English Immersion curriculum and the Arizona Professional Teaching Standards, they were succumbing to this year’s witchhunt for words. […]
Arizona State University and Trump
On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for […]
The Guano Caucus
Guano Point sits 75 miles north of Kingman, Arizona, on the southern lip of the Western Grand Canyon, and on it perches the remnants of a tramway system, a launching point for failed dreams and a missing 99,000 tons of guano. We’ll return in a bit to the missing guano. As Roger Smith tells the […]
Bulwer Lytton of the Caliche
“The corporate communist globalist satanic Uniparty is the faction our founders warned us about,” Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers tweeted August 4. It’s the type of unhinged comment we now expect from Sen. Rogers, but it would also make a great first sentence for a spy thriller— okay, a hilariously-awful one. Or take the grandstanding of […]
Raising Arizona’s children — a newcomer perspective
As a newcomer to Arizona since June 2014, and with an absorbing job that has been my focus for the last 15 months, I have largely stood back and watched the state’s education politics. For a small (-population) state such as Arizona, it has been an eventful 15 months: The (former) incumbent state superintendent was […]