By Oronte. If there’s one good reason to have a giant national conference for writers, it’s the chance to see once-a-year-in-person friends like Tom Williams, author of The Mimic's Own Voice and Chair of English at Morehead State University. We always make plans, then we get bookfair blindness like everybody else and the plans don’t happen. But without fail, year after year, we run into each other on the sidewalk or in a hotel lobby and take up the conversation as if uninterrupted. Tom has had a couple of big happy events this year, including the release of his blues novel, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, which arrived at my house only the day I left for the conference in Seattle. I know him well enough as a warm and generous person that I thought I'd best get an objective, third-party review. I asked Sean Singer, who I welcome to the blog for the first time, to take a look. Read more...

By John Warner. Yesterday the South Carolina state house released a revised proposal regarding the merger of the College of Charleston with the Medical University of South Carolina. Perhaps stung by the blowback regarding the original proposed merger, Representatives Jim Merrill (R) and Leon Stavrinakis (D) put forward a plan to scotch the shotgun marriage and “create a research university at the existing University of Charleston, South Carolina.” Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. So far the higher education press has paid scant attention to the Google Gmail Litigation case in the Northern District of California Federal Court, San Jose.  If there is a jurisdiction worth watching for issues of consumer privacy and intellectual property, more patent than copyright, this is the one!  And of all the cases in the former category, none is more important than Google Gmail. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Yesterday I followed tweets from Gretchen Caserotti, director of the public library in Meridian, Idaho, as she attended a school board hearing over Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie is one of my favorite writers. It’s hard to imagine what is so objectionable about this story about a bookish Native kid who gets bullied as much for bookishness as for being an Indian at a mostly white school. But then, I couldn’t really get why people in my true-blue home state of Minnesota objected to Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, either. Parents complained that some of the characters in the book talk like, um, teenagers. Actually, like fourth-graders. If you don’t like that kind of language, don’t go near the playground during recess. Read more...