At this point, no one can deny that higher education has changed seriously over the last few decades. Call it corporatization, or administrative bloat, or any other name, but the symptoms are clear: more administrative control over things that had been the faculty’s. Faculty governance becoming a mere rubber stamp for administrators’ proposals. Less funding…
Online teaching remains one of the most talked-about topics of the day in higher education, and there are no shortage of studies on the topic. Do students learn more online? Do they learn less? Do they learn slightly less, but maybe it saves so much money that administrators will still find it appealing? But left…
When Joe Moxley first published Writing Commons, an online textbook, the copyright (as is common) was held by his publisher, Pearson. After five years, their ownership of the work ended and the copyright belonged to Moxley again. He realized that he now had a number of interesting options for the future of his work. After…
Silvio Lacetti is a recently retired professor from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. While attending a retirement party for a colleague, he happened upon an intriguing idea: What if, rather than having a single retirement party, he organized dozens of small dinners, with one of his old students at each? And rather than…
The September-October issue of Academe has just been posted (and will be in your mailboxes soon). In the issue, Rick Perloff looks at the campaign to unionize Cleveland State University twenty years ago, and William Vesterman looks even further back—to turn-of-the-century economist Thorstein Veblen—to learn lessons about the university today. Leslie Bary uses the benefit…
The new issue of Academe takes a look at all aspects of governing boards. There are individual perspectives and individual institutions that get examined, but also a broader, quantitative look at how faculty participate on boards. In 2011-2012, researchers at the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) did a survey of faculty members who serve…
Recently, the administration of the City University of New York proposed a series of academic changes to the school, grouping these changes together under the name “Pathways.” The system would make it easier for students to transfer between CUNY schools, and it would have looser graduation requirements. This proposal and the faculty opposition to it…
Last week, I attended a presentation by William Doyle, a professor at Vanderbilt University, about his proposals to change the way student aid works in America. His analysis was sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, who also hosted the presentation. You can read the report on CED’s website. Professor Doyle’s ideas center around one…
Francis Bacon wrote that people with disability develop to be “extreme bold” as a habit born of their need to defend themselves from the “scorn” of others. No doubt much has changed in the years since Bacon opined on the matter, but Stephen Kuusisto writes, in “Extreme Bold in the Faculty Ranks,” that students and…
Over the past few years, plenty of ink has been spent discussing the question of how college changes students. They don’t just learn facts, of course—there are lots of important skills to learn inside and outside the classroom. Students also change as they grow out of their teens and into their early twenties. In the…