Maybe if we started ignoring the big-name speakers that universities pay to speak at commencements, the schools would start providing speakers who actually have a message to give to students setting out to make their mark on the world, and who aren’t making a buck to deliver it.
Instead, these choices are often part of the school’s marketing scheme. Pay some money, get a big name, get some free advertising in the form of news coverage.
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This time of the year can be difficult for those of us with educational self-esteem problems.
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Airline service to Chicago returns tomorrow to St. Cloud. The initial fares are more than competitive with the Twin Cities. Read more →
Today’s dispatch from the ‘Department of What Were They Thinking.’ Eighth grade students in Rialto, California were given an assignment to debate whether the Holocaust really happened. Read more →
In an op-ed in today’s Star Tribune Daniel Wolpert of Minneapolis defends the practice of judging the parents in news stories where a child has done wrong.
Clearly, Wolpert is talking mostly about the parents of John LaDue of Waseca. He’s the 17-year-old boy charged with a plot to set off bombs at schools in Waseca, then shoot kids trying to flee. Reportedly, he planned to kick off his day by killing his parents. Read more →
Is going to college still worth the cost? Yes. Next question. Read more →
The next time someone dismisses Twitter as just a place where you post about what you’re having for lunch, tell them the story of Torri Biddle, 19, an Ohio woman who was born without an arm. Read more →
Is it time to turn the page on the University of Iowa’s infamous pink visitors’ locker room at Kinnick Stadium?
Famed coach Hayden Fry had the locker room painted pink in 1979, and the university added pink urinals in a renovation in 2005. Read more →
Since 2008, analogies to Nazis have permeated the American political discourse, pretty much neutering the true historical impact of the systematic extermination of a race.
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Thousands of government bodies all over the United States — including the Minnesota House and Senate — open their meetings and sessions with a prayer. Today the U.S. Supreme Court gave the practice its blessing. Read more →
How prepared do you want to be for what’s coming? In New York Mills, Patrick Kilby is making a pretty decent living in the dying business. He simple pine boxes for caskets. Read more →
Dave Hickman was hunting with his grandfather near Boston, Indiana back in 1955 when he heard a cooing sound. The teenager looked in some brush and found a baby. How and why she got there is anybody’s guess, but their time together was short lived. The baby was turned over to a sheriff. Eventually, she was adopted by a couple, who moved away.
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There aren’t many companies with a bigger bunker mentality than Target, so it’s unlikely we’re ever going to get the story behind today’s announcement that president and CEO Gregg Steinhafel has left the company in the wake of last fall’s big data breach. Steinhafel has “resigned,” which is corporate speak for “he was fired” but Read more →
You have a choice, Minnesota. You can either avoid the pothole craters or you can get a ticket for straying outside your lane. What will it be? Read more →
While generally making himself available as needed to the Minnesota news media, U.S. Sen. Al Franken doesn’t do a lot of interviews with national journalists, who generally consider themselves a cut above their local brethren.
It’s not hard to figure out why. National reporters just can’t seem to get over the idea that the guy was once on Saturday Night Live. Read more →
Bob Collins