74 years ago this month, five-year-old Barnaby Baxter wished for a fairy godmother. Instead, Mr. O’Malley – a loquacious, endearing, pink-winged con-artist – flew through Barnaby’s (open) bedroom window, and announced himself as the lad’s fairy godfather. For the next ten years, devoted readers of Crockett Johnson‘s Barnaby saw O’Malley elected to congress, running a
Welcome to the sixth aggregation of quotations that interest me – that is, the sixth blog installment of my “commonplace book,” a sixteenth-century tradition (that continued for several centuries), in which “one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement” (OED). I’ve thus far done two other “general”
When the state legislature decides to weaponize our classrooms, how do we respond? What should we do when the phrase “killing higher education” ceases being a metaphor and becomes state policy? I tackle these questions in “Just a Shot Away,” published today in Inside Higher Ed. Here’s the opening: Shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre,