Looking at Veterans on Campus
Margaret Bellafiore is an artist and a professor of art at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. She has never served in the military, but over the last few years, she noticed that some of her students were creating art that included militarized imagery. The students were veterans who had returned home and gone to college,…
More on Queensborough Community College
Last week, the Queensborough Community College English Department voted to refuse a reduction in workload hours for its First Year Composition courses, supposedly a necessity for the City University of New York’s new Pathways to a Common Core initiative. Vice President Karen Steele then sent an email to the department that seemed to threaten draconian…
CFHE’s Report on Contingent Faculty
At the end of August, the Center for the Future of Higher Education released its second policy report from. The report is titled “Who Is “Professor Staff? And How Can This Person Teach So Many Classes?” It offers a very detailed and deeply unsettling view of how our colleges and universities exploit contingent faculty. The…
CUNY Pathways: The Danger of Ignoring Shared Governance
If you don’t start building a new organizational program from the ground up but impose it from the top down, you are going to lose control when the program has to be implemented by people with no real commitment to it, no feeling of ownership of it. We’re seeing that right now with implementation of…
Voter Suppression and Democratic Expression
The Hard Sell and the Educator
Guest blogger Barbara Madeloni of the UMass Amherst School of Education chose to boycott the Teacher Performance Assessment field test via Pearson. As a result, her contract was not renewed. There is a movement for her reinstatement through a petition that can be signed here. The incursion of for profit companies into higher education occurs with willing collaborators. Whether misguided,…
The Mistrustees
Joel Shatzky is Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Cortland, where he taught from 1968-2005. He presently teaches at Kingsborough Community College. The influence of big-time collegiate sports on the culture and priorities of universities has been a subject of considerable concern over the last few years. According to a recent Knight Foundation report: Presidents of universities with…