I always learn from and enjoy the comments made by readers of this blog, print media and through social media like Twitter. One comment struck me this week, in particular, that cast light on a growing and persistent problem within higher education. How do we create a pipeline between higher education sectors to benefit our…
Ahead of the Super Bowl, an MSNBC employee tweeted that he expected that a Cheerios commercial featuring a bi-racial couple would provoke outrage from the Far Right. GOP national chairman, Reince Priebus, denounced the tweet as an inflammatory mischaracterization of the Far Right. MSNBC President Phil Griffin then apologized for the tweet, describing it as…
For the past five to six months, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been confronting a seemingly ever-increasing number of legislative and legal investigations into misconduct by his immediate subordinates, starting with the politically motivated decision to close lanes leading onto the George Washington Bridge but expanding into seeming improprieties in how federal funds allocated…
My Professional Activity Report and Self Evaluation (or PARSE) is over twenty pages long… not counting all of the required documentation. PARSE was instituted to save time and space–it’s all on computer and just needs ‘updating’ each year–but it seems to have become a repository of everything that can either be scanned or entered having…
When I read the headline that King Jong Un had received an honorary degree, I assumed immediately that it had been awarded by a North Korean University. I was surprised that it had been awarded by a private Malaysian University, but I was not aware that, except for China, Malaysia has maintained closer relations with…
In an earlier post, “Meningitis B at Princeton and at the University of California at Santa Barbara” (https://academeblog.org/2013/12/10/meningitis-b-at-princeton-at-the-university-of-california-at-santa-barbara/), I reported on the outbreaks of the disease among students at the two campuses and on the decision by the Centers for Disease Control to allow a vaccine not yet approved for use in the U.S. to…
Over the past six months, I have posted two other speeches by Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez: his comments in commemoration of Labor Day and his very well-received speech to the national convention of the AFL-CIO. He has already established himself nationally as a very strong and impassioned voice in support of workers and…
The Orwellian-named “Protect Academic Freedom Act” is not a defense of academic freedom; this is a total attack on academic freedom. Now, you might think that it’s purely a symbolic law because no American college would ever endorse an academic boycott of Israel, and it doesn’t even apply to colleges that are institutional members of…
Whatever you might think of the American Studies Association’s stance on boycotting Israel, the attempted legal “remedies” have to be seen as worse. Pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, or a pox on both houses… it shouldn’t matter. The implications for academic freedom carried in the various bills should bother anyone who cares about this great tradition of our…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org. _______________ In November, the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and Workforce launched an electronic forum to gather comments from contingent faculty members about their working conditions and the effect of those working conditions on students. The recently-released…