Newt Gingrich declared in 1995, “I am the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson.” If Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, we will see the first presidential contest fought by ex-professors in American history. But if Gingrich wins, what would his presidency mean for higher education? Gingrich’s history as a professor certainly doesn’t make him…
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell wants to be a reverse-Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to give to the rich and forcing public colleges to obey his terrible ideas. Gov. McDonnell is proposing that public colleges should not be allowed to increase the revenue allocated from tuition funds for financial aid to help the poor. According…
The following guest post was authored by David Rintoul, who is a biology professor and faculty senator at Kansas State University. Universities have many policies and procedures for resolving disagreements that arise between faculty members, between faculty members and administration, between faculty members and students, etc. Many of these are carefully crafted in order to…
Sometime in the last few weeks, a new website has gone up that monitors for-profit education. It’s called ForProfitU, and it’s a project of the Service Employees International Union. According to the website’s About page, “For-Profit U aims to educate students, parents, press and the general public on the dangers of for-profit colleges.” On February 2,…
By James Simeone The Illinois Wesleyan University AAUP reading group met on September 29, 2011 to discuss Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The discussion was framed by the censoring, earlier in September, of a student poet in Hansen Student Center. A…
Josh Boldt is a Writing Instructor and EdTech Consultant at the University of Georgia. This entry is cross-posted from his blog Copy & Paste. Yesterday, Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and newfound hero of contingent faculty everywhere, published the essay “Among the Majority” on the MLA website. The piece is a reflection…
I’m sure plenty of people saw the irony in the New York Times report about the invitation of retired Lt. Gen William G. Boykin to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast, where “civil liberties advocates…called on the Military Academy to rescind the invitation.” Obviously, it is very odd for anyone concerned about civil liberties…