Zachary Michael Jack 8
Catalonia Could Happen Here
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 United States, and sooner than Americans…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
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 way than one might imagine. While…
As North Korea Goes Nuclear Far East Ambassadors Must Speak Up
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 job,” as farm families are wont…
Trump: America’s Father-in-Chief?
Donald Trump has been called many things in the press in the first six months of his presidency, yet the media have thus far missed his most overlooked calling card:…
Trump: America’s First Black Friday President
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 conclusion: Trump may be America’s first…
Professor-in-Chief
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 lady received high rankings from observers…
Agrarian Fireworks
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 wonder why, exactly, we do what we do…
30 More Years of Rootless Professors
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 much hasn’t, regarding academe’s reputedly rootless…