I’ve neglected PoT for the better part of the summer, and intend to continue the policy of neglect for the next few weeks. Explanation: Alison and I got married in January, and purchased a home (a townhouse) in June, closing in mid-July. Though I’m an old hand at the marriage thing, this was our first home purchase, and involved a pretty steep learning curve, having to do with a complicated bunch of adult transactions. So that absorbed a fair bit of time and energy.

And though the move in my case was “just” a matter of 40 miles–we moved two counties west of where I’d previously lived–it involved a bit of culture shock from which I haven’t yet recovered: from blue-voting Essex County to the 25th Trumpiest Town in New Jersey, just a few miles down the highway from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. (Not sure we have room in our family budget for a membership there, but definitely looking into it.) The cultural change is not quite but almost on par with what one encounters on driving the two miles between the West Bank and Jerusalem, or Sderot and Gaza. But more on that some other time.  Continue reading →

OK, so he has objectionable views on incest. But can we really treat those as a proxy for his views on policy? Non-incest-based policy, I mean.  What if, as a condition of being elected, he promises never to touch the incest laws (and we can hold him to that), but as an accountant, he promises to reform the tax code in a desirable way?

You have to be grateful for a political environment that dishes up real-life examples of a kind you couldn’t have invented in a thought-experiment.

Here’s the text of a letter I wrote my Senator, Bob Menendez, on Donald Trump’s missile strikes on Syria a few weeks ago. His “response” follows. Obviously, it isn’t really a response, and isn’t really meant as one. I’m just curious what it takes to get a straight answer from our politicians on matters of war and peace. Famous last words, I realize.  Continue reading →

At the end of the article, they make a hasty generalization says that the officer was a young officer that and his first instinct was to act in a situation where he thought a crime was happening. So therefore if someone is a young officer they will always jump into actions based on assumption that a crime is happening? That is not correct because we can see throughout the news that this is not the first case that this has happened and the officers are not young, they all different ages and come from backgrounds.

Having trouble following that? I don’t blame you. It’s a verbatim excerpt from a student response to a take-home exam I gave in my Phil 100 class, Critical Thinking. The whole essay reads like this. Neither the article mentioned nor the response given has anything (at all) to do with the exam assignment, which the student has blithely ignored. No information is given about the article, either: no author, title, date, or source. Continue reading →

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale does not make national news very often.  Occasionally the Salukis will pop onto the radar for sports fans, but given just how much “news” (using that term loosely) gets generated in the field of sport, those developments tend to age and be forgotten rather quickly.  When the university does draw national attention for academic, rather than athletic matters, more often than not, the story is a negative one.  And that is certainly the case when it comes to the latest development.

Two weeks ago, an internal memo got leaked.  It was from an associate dean for Research, Budget, and Personnel, Michael Molino, and addressed to department chairs in several of the colleges.  The SIUC Alumni Association – and as it turns out, the provost (though not mentioned in the memo) – were starting a pilot program looking to bring in qualified alumni with Ph.D.s for three year appointments with “zero time adjunct status” in graduate programs.

Within hours of the leak – first as a Facebook post by “The Professor Is In” – a variety of conversations, questions, knee jerk reactions, and rants flooded the internet, particularly on Twitter.  Nearly all of it was clearly negative in nature, but hard information about the precise motivation and meaning of the memo was lacking, and as an alumnus of SIUC, the first thing that struck me was how a very unlikely school had suddenly become –  in the minds of many people – a stand-in for their (often legitimate) gripes about contemporary academia in general. Continue reading →