Recall that Senator Collins’ recent commencement speeches at both UMaine and Colby stressed the need for civility inside the political arena and outside. This is the same tired rhetoric that makes too many Mainers believe that, when push comes to shove, Collins acts and votes that even-handed way in the Senate. Hardly true. Recall that […]
Many of us listened to your cliche-filled UME commencement address not that many years ago, and it is interesting that you’d get a return engagement this year. I don’t know of any other person ever getting a return engagement like you. But the Collins family and, by extension, the Republican Party nowadays controls public higher […]
With the resignation of Speaker Paul Ryan, our US Representative Bruce Poliquin is well placed to succeed him. “Why not the best,” as Admiral Hyman Rickover liked to say. Poliquin has been outspoken defender of the interests of the Second District, well at least some of them. His repeated refusal to keep ObamaCare alive in […]
After the Bangor Schools administration prevented any media coverage of last Friday’s protest by many Bangor High students over gun ownership and safety, the Republicans who control public education in Bangor must be besides themselves with anxiety over today’s protests across Maine and across the nation. At a minimum, some school administrators should be out […]
If any Maine students wished to leave school for seventeen minutes in order to demand greater access to guns and to lower (or maintain) the age at which weapons could be purchased, would most Maine school authorities object? Hardly. And if these or other conservative students wished to leave school for seventeen minutes to wave […]
As many school districts and systems across Maine and across America are allowing students and sometimes staff to participate in peaceful protests about gun violence in recent and future weeks, Maine has a Superintendent, Virginia Rebar, who has no interest in such presumably “liberal” activities. Rebar oversees schools in Moscow and Bingham and made clear […]
The UMaine System had a golden opportunity to promote around the world its pioneering and widely applauded “One University” reconfiguration during the Superbowl. Might have generated lots more applications. If, to be sure, the System is getting considerably more applicants, many of those students are in fact dropping out in their first year. True, the […]
Years ago, when I was teaching the American survey course, I had a student who was widely touted in the Maine sports media as a likely bet to become a major league baseball player. The then head baseball coach also bragged in the media about the high academic averages of his team. Nothing wrong with […]
The Attorneys General of Massachusetts, Illinois, and New York have filed a third lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education. According to the lawsuit, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has failed to assist the tens of thousands of victims of for-profit colleges. Specifically, the agency has allegedly violated federal laws with its endless delays in […]
Many admirers of Sen. Susan Collins were surprised and dismayed by her vote early Saturday morning to pass the much revised Senate tax return bill, with its devastating cuts to ObamaCare and its burdensome taxation of graduate student stipends throughout American higher education–among other controversial components. I was not surprised. I have never been persuaded […]
