The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…
Conversation is the coin of the realm in American higher education. Shared governance rests upon reasonable, open and transparent communication. Internal and external constituencies – including parents, alumni, donors, political leaders, and the media – embrace the motivations and actions that shape education, often more so depending upon who delivers the message. Curiously, conversation can…
Guest blogger Gaye Tuchman is Professor Emertia of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (2009) and Making News (1978). Not so long ago you could ask, “What’s black and white and read all over,” and everyone knew you were referring to a newspaper (well maybe a blushing zebra). …
Historic Highs and Lows in Unemployment In my previous post in this series, I closed by noting that proponents of “right to work” might very well want to emphasize that eight of the ten states with the lowest current unemployment averages are “right to work” states. Those states are Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, South…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 6 Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham U P, 2008. In this seminal work of the corporatization of American universities, Frank Donoghue offers a much longer historical view than most other authors focusing…
If you haven’t read the letter from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department to Harvard’s Michael Sandel about his “Justice” MOOC through MIT and Harvard’s edX program, you really should. I think it might become a classic document in the history of the long, slow decline of American Higher Education. For one thing, it’s…
The following e-mail is from World Net Daily, which represents a worldview somewhere quite to the right of National Review, American Spectator, and RedStates. It is worth the few minutes that it will take to read the e-mail to gain a clearer (if more mind-boggling) sense of what folks on that far-right edge of the…
The following mission statement is taken directly from the website for the Clean Ohio Fund: “The Clean Ohio Fund restores, protects, and connects Ohio’s important natural and urban places by preserving green space and farmland, improving outdoor recreation, and cleaning up brownfields to encourage redevelopment and revitalize communities.” More specifically, the site delineates the ways…
Huffington Post recently ran a series of photographs of an abandoned farmhouse in which all of the previous occupants’ furniture and other belongings have been left to gather dust. Here are several of those photos: The rest of the photographs in this series can be found at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/abandoned-farmhouse_n_3163713.html These photographs reminded me of the haunting…
Here’s one from The Onion. If you don’t subscribe to their daily newsletter or site feeds or regularly visit their site, you really ought to do so. Sometimes the satire is very close to the reality that it is targeting, but at least you can laugh instead of weeping. Professor Deeply Hurt by Student’s Evaluation…