Articles by Malcolm A. Kline

The reaction to movie icon Clint Eastwood’s “debate” with an unoccupied stool representing President Obama at the Republican convention has, predictably, extended to the faculty lounge.

It turns out that the United States may be losing out on yet another international education comparison.

“College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.”—U. S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc.

The U. S. Department of Education is using a federal  anti-discrimination statute in a way that is sure to drive even more men off of college campuses, where they are already a minority.

Even on the economic issues that underpin the Occupiers’ angst, it is difficult not to notice that while businesses remain boarded up from coast to coast, government agencies do not.

Academics frequently take we unlettered folk to task for trivializing serious issues. It turns out that they can take us to school on how to do just that.

Academics are hardly shy about offering businesses advice but they go ballistic when industry deigns to return the favor.

“I’ve spent most of my life in academia, and can say with some conviction that most professors have no friends or colleagues who are out-of-the-closet traditionalists.”— Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) , 21st Century chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Arguably America’s public schools worked better when there were truly local. Yet a series of U. S. presidents—Republican and Democratic—have added even more centralization to the schools.

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, is in such a position right now.

“You know that a lot of people don’t have a big imagination, even with sixth-graders, their imagination is slowly dying, so you have to continue to dream big and you can do great things in life.”—Imaginative sixth-grader Gabrielle Williams

“With the exception of a few areas — specifically, climate and the environment, certain fields within biology and medicine, history of science and the interaction between science and public policy — the rot that infects the rest of academia has been averted in science and engineering schools.”— Ron Lipsman, professor emeritus of mathematics and former senior associate dean of the College of Computer, Math & Physical Sciences, University of Maryland.