mediacrit.com

As the Iowa Legislature seeks to finish its session, it is now essential for all of us to take an objective look at the proposed closing of the Malcolm Price Laboratory School, Iowa’s R&D School.

We need to ask a simple question about the rationale for the closing: where is the evidence?  Because if you don’t ask that now, I have two other good ideas for you:  let’s close the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, send away the patients, and distribute the training medical professionals to hospitals throughout the state.  And, let’s close the Research and Demonstration Farms at Iowa State, sell the animals and property, and assign students and professors to study at farmsteads across the state.  If you think those are bad ideas, they represent the same decision that has been made for the University of Northern Iowa – cutting its own R&D facility and sending students and faculty away from campus. [Read more →]

The idea for this column started with a nagging question:  why does Truman State, the former Northeast Missouri State University, keep beating the University of Northern Iowa every year in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of Midwestern public universities?

For several years, UNI has appeared among the top-ranked public universities in the Midwest by U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” guidebook. UNI was once again highly ranked in the 2012 guidebook, and UNI trumpeted this in a Sept. 13, 2011 release and on its National Rankings and Honors website.  Once again we were behind Truman State.

As the Iowa House of Representatives insists that public university budgets still need to be cut (after years of cuts—have they looked at the trend line?), there has been little discussion at UNI about how to consider athletic programs in light of budget reductions.  Does Truman State have some secret in resource allocation that drives its success?  I decided to analyze the U.S. News & World Report 2012 rankings for the Top 50 Midwestern universities (eliminating private universities, since they don’t have to deal with the politics of state funding).  Who were UNI’s public university peers in the Midwest, and why was Truman State always the highest ranked public institution?

UNI Panthers at Play in the UNIDome

One very interesting anomaly emerged for UNI in comparison to its high-rated Midwestern regional public university peers:  UNI alone has NCAA Division I athletic programs.  And that tells us a lot of what we should know about UNI’s budget. [Read more →]

We stopped by Zuccotti Park to see the birthplace of the Occupy movement.  As you might know, police cleared Zuccotti Park of the protester element in the middle of the night on Nov. 15, 2011 because they caused problems. “Conditions at the park had deteriorated to the point that serious concerns about crime, fire hazards and public health needed to be addressed,” said Sheryl Neufeld, senior counsel with the New York City Law Department, building the case for the city to clear the park.  Seeing the park, the first thing that struck me is that park is almost completely made of granite.  So, you can imagine the fire hazard potential. [Read more →]

It is an article of faith with the political far right that the mainstream news media are, in the words of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the “lamestream media.”

The conservatives are correct – the mainstream news media often are lame.  But, it’s not because the news media are liberal, which is the point of Palin’s name-calling.  In fact, the mainstream news media far too frequently accept conservative propaganda as news.  That’s not liberal, just lame.

James O'Keefe at Courthouse, 2010

The most recent example of lameness came in the news media’s response to the latest stunt by conservative activist James O’Keefe.  On March 8, 2011, O’Keefe posted an 11 minute, 38 second video on his Project Veritas website (whose tagline is “Promoting Modern-Day Muckrakers”). Two of O’Keefe’s associates presented themselves as representatives of a Muslim organization, and asked leading questions of NPR Foundation executives Ronald Schiller and Betsy Liley in what was presumed by them to be a fundraising lunch meeting.  A hidden camera captured the audio of the meeting and a shot of Schiller.  Schiller reportedly called Tea Party activists “racists” and suggested that National Public Radio would be better off without federal funding. [Read more →]