Zachary Michael Jack

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http://www.zacharyjack.org

Zachary Michael Jack is an agrarian writer, scholar, and commentator and a seventh generation Iowan who teaches courses in writing, publishing, place studies, leadership studies, and geodemographics at North Central College. The author of many books as well as commentaries on culture and politics in newspapers and periodicals nationwide, Zachary's latest books are March of the Suffragettes: Rosalie Gardiner Jones and the March for Voting Rights and Wish You Were Here: Love and Longing in an American Heartland.

Recent Essays

The Blackboard

Early-Alerting Early-Alert Systems on College Campuses

Zachary Michael Jack - January 13, 2020

The university’s best, most utopian aims must not beget dystopian early-alert policies that infringe on students’ personal liberties while turning campus into a place where everyone is an informant, and deviations from the norm beget Orwellian intervention.

The Nightstand

The Agrarian’s Soul and the Gardener’s Art: Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion

Zachary Michael Jack - November 22, 2019

I have no doubt this collection would delight Bailey, dandelions and all. Selecting and anthologizing the work of a writer-scholar as prolific as this is a labor of love as much as caretaking, stewarding, gardening, weeding, and pruning.

Region & Place

Catalonia Could Happen Here

Zachary Michael Jack - November 29, 2017

As a scholar of Regional and Place Studies and a historian of secessionist movements I believe Catalonia’s brand of separatism could come to the...

Education & Liberal Learning

A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom

Zachary Michael Jack - November 11, 2017

Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive...

Economics & Empire

As North Korea Goes Nuclear Far East Ambassadors Must Speak Up

Zachary Michael Jack - August 16, 2017

I lived much of my adult life under Terry Branstad’s multiple tenures as governor of Iowa, and I think he did a “pretty fair...

Articles

Trump: America’s Father-in-Chief?

Zachary Michael Jack - June 18, 2017

Donald Trump has been called many things in the press in the first six months of his presidency, yet the media have thus far...

Culture, High & Low

Trump: America’s First Black Friday President

Zachary Michael Jack - December 6, 2016

Like many Americans I’ve struggled to put the election of 2016 in proper perspective the last few weeks, only to arrive at an unexpected...

Politics & Power

Professor-in-Chief

Zachary Michael Jack - November 8, 2016

After the second, town hall-styled presidential debate pundits raved, and perhaps rightly so, about Hilary Clinton’s ability to handle the format. The former first...

Region & Place

Agrarian Fireworks

Zachary Michael Jack - July 3, 2016

If you’re like me, holidays leave you feeling unusually contemplative, I suppose because the everyone-is-doing-it mentality awakens in us the long-slumbering cultural anthropologist. Holidays cause me to...

Education & Liberal Learning

30 More Years of Rootless Professors

Zachary Michael Jack - June 30, 2015

In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and...