Getting rid of philosophy, etc. The present (manufactured) budget crisis in Illinois offers an easy excuse for “flexibility,” really another name for destruction.
Diana Rauner, wife of Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, leads a child-advocacy group suing the governor and various state agencies for breach of contract.
I for one would find it impossible to vote for a candidate who did not evince some core element of integrity, however consonant with my views that candidate’s views might be.
The Associated Press’s announcement of a Democratic nominee, an announcement made on the eve of major primaries and seven weeks before the party’s convention, is to my mind a low point in journalism.
Our “pro-business” governor seems incapable of understanding that shutting down social-service agencies, decimating public higher education, and failing to pay the state’s bills do little to foster economic growth or human well-being.
Andrew Sullivan’s recent lament about the failure of “elites” to protect democracy from the likes of Donald Trump misses the point that Trump’s candidacy is itself the product of an elite — not a political elite but a media elite, one that has kept Trump (and even his parked plane) front and center for months now.
Some money is better than no money, but today’s vote does nothing to provide a secure future for public higher education in Illinois, no more than having three months’ rent on hand would provide a secure future for a tenant.
“[W]e feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders.
Ringo Starr has canceled a concert in North Carolina to protest state-sponsored discrimination against LGBT people. I am a bit thrilled to see that he has cited Canned Heat in doing so.
The Illinois higher-ed crisis makes it into The New York Times
It is good to see the Times paying attention. But I don’t know of anyone in Illinois who sees the current budget crisis as a matter of “politics as usual.”
The mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.