Higher Education

Bracket busted? How about a nice Marxist critique of the NCAA tournament? Call it the theory of surplus value in high-tops . . .  On Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show today, David Zirin, sports guy at the far-left Nation mag, called the NCAA tournament nothing less than "the organized theft of black wealth."

As noted this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Jezebel's Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrote a Friday morning hit piece directed at Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican Governor, calling him a "conservative werewolf" for including a provision in the Badger State's latest proposed budget to eliminate the requirement that universities report campus sexual assault statistics to the state. Vargas-…

Friday's CBS This Morning surprisingly covered a proposed bill in Florida that would allow college students with concealed firearms permits to carry their weapons onto campus. Michelle Miller spotlighted a Florida State University graduate student who backs the bill. However, Miller also featured two opponents of such "campus carry" legislation during her report.

On Friday morning at Jezebel, a Gawker-affiliated web site, Natasha Vargas-Cooper thought she had Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by the — well, you know. In a post tellingly tagged "Conservative Werewolves," Vargas-Cooper was absolutely sure — so certain that she apparently felt no need to check any further — that Walker's proposed budget would allow its colleges to "to stop reporting sexual…

While it's performing a long overdue housecleaning, MSNBC should point its broom in Melissa Harris-Perry's direction and sweep her off the network for her anti-democratic, violence-advocating rant earlier this week at Cornell University. Among other things, Harris-Perry told her audience that George Zimmerman deserved whatever injuries he received at the hands of Trayvon Martin in the violent…

Wrapping up an interview with actor Tom Hanks on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer took time to promote a January op-ed Hanks wrote for The New York Times praising "free" community college: "I read this op-ed you wrote recently....I love that. Why was it so important for you to get that message out there?"

In a discussion with plenty of other objectionable elements on Sean Hannity's Fox News show Friday, Juan Williams asserted that "There's no question that if you look at our Constitution, there are elements of racism right in it." Note his use of the present tense. The version of this country's founding document Williams was referencing must be 147 or more years old, because the only element of…

Introducing a segment on Wednesday's NBC Today that portrayed Iranian citizens studying at a U.S. college as victims of prejudice, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: "And now we move to the growing backlash over a new policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Iranian nationals are being banned from studying certain science and engineering courses there."

Responding to a question on Facebook Tuesday about left-wing pundit Howard Dean attacking Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as "unknowledgeable" for not graduating college, Mike Rowe, host of CNN's Somebody's Gotta Do It, dismantled Dean's assertion and wondered if America had "confused qualifications with competency."

The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman argues that “anti-intellectualism has often been an effective way for Republicans to stir up class resentment while distracting from economic issues. It says to voters…[d]on't aim your disgruntlement at Wall Street, or corporations that don't pay taxes, or the people who want to keep wages low and make unions a memory. Point it in a different direction, at…

What a snob!  On today's Morning Joe, Howard Dean, a product of fancy prep schools and Yale, suggested that Scott Walker was unfit to be president because his lack of a college degree rendered him "unknowledgeable." Dean's disdain for the un-diplomaed came during a discussion of Walker having declined, during his recent trip to the UK, to state whether he believes in evolution.  Joe Scarborough…

Republicans in Congress need to hold tobacco company-style hearings, hauling in the presidents of various universities and asking them to justify their multimillion-dollar salaries.

After all three network evening newscasts ignored President Obama dropping his controversial plan to tax 529 college savings accounts on Tuesday, only Wednesday's CBS This Morning noticed the development, giving it a mere seventeen seconds. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America covered the White House reversal.

In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea…