9/11 and academic freedom, the weird side
And now, just days after Brigham Young suspended physicist Steven E. Jones, there’s an article about pressure on the University of New Hampshire to fire William Woodward, who (like Jones and Kevin Barrett) is a member of Scholars For 9/11 Truth. Especially troubling is word that ACTA has called for an investigation into Woodward, presuming […]
9/11 conspiracy theories and academic freedom
Brigham Young University has placed physicist Steven Jones on paid leave while it investigates his publications related to 9/11 and his claims that evidence shows the use of thermite in the collapse of the WTC. Let me state right off the bat that I don’t find his argument credible. Jones is also one of the […]
Backpedaling on the achievement gap
I’ve been puzzled by Kevin Carey’s blog entries Thursday and Friday, in response to a Richard Rothstein essay and AFT’s NCLBlog, respectively. Here’s the critical claim of Carey (from Thursday): NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It’s based on the premise that good schools can raise […]
What do you think of this accountability mixed metaphor?
I’m now done with the preface and chapters 1-2 of Accountability Frankenstein, and I just noticed the following mixed metaphor: For a school official to say blithely that elementary teachers should deemphasize -ing word endings in language arts because -s and -es endings are on the test but -ing endings are not is letting the […]
Adventures in postmodernist typos
By Sherman Dorn on September 7, 2006
So after reading Michel Bérubé’s blog entry yesterday, wherein he discusses “residual humanism at work in Marxism [Raymond] Williams-style,” and why he likes it, among other things, something in it reminded me of his July 25, 2005, entry, wherein he had discussed the latest Harry Potter book and cultural studies, writing at the end, If […]
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