For several hours, I have been puzzling over Ulf Kirchendorfer’s most recent post, “Why Torture Is So American!” Irony and satire are sometimes as difficult to understand and to respond to as they are engaging and provocative. Ulf’s post is certainly very provocative in highlighting the ways in which “torture” may be said to have…
In its list of the most influential people in higher education for 2014, the Chronicle of Higher Education includes diverse individuals and just one group, “The Hired Guns: The Consultants.” In her article on the increasing influence of consulting firms on higher-education policies and practices, Goldie Blumenstyk seems to think that this increased influence is…
There is growing consensus that more attention must be paid to increasing the number of two-year graduates who go on to complete a four-year degree. While over 80 percent of first year community college students state completion of a four-year degree as their intention, less than 12 percent of them accomplish their goal. This dismal…
Every American school child knows or should know about the Salem witch trials, and part of that chapter of American history involves torture. Perhaps we should not torture our own citizens that overtly, but events as they transpired a few hundred years ago certainly represent American ingenuity so that an early form of water torture,…
Philosophy professor Joseph Levine argues in a New York Times blog that Steven Salaita was justified in violating standards of civility in a particular tweet about anyone who supports Israel during the attacks on Gaza being “an awful human being.” Levine defends Salaita against the charge of incivility on the grounds that he believes Salaita’s views to be…
“It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom which is the subject of this report is that of the teacher,” says the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Freedom. The 1940 Statement follows up: Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their…
Thomas Frank, perhaps best known for What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an examination of America’s new conservatism, has an article in Salon, “The New Republic, the torture report, and the TED talks geniuses who gutted journalism.” Toward the end, he writes this: The new press lord’s deeds are all made possible by the shrinking significance of everyone…
The strike by graduate students at the University of Oregon lasted eight days and ended after a 22-hour marathon session with a mediator. Here the highlights of what the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation achieved in their new contract: 1. a 10% increase in wages over the next two years; 2. two weeks of flex time for medical…
Fred Shapiro, an associate director at Yale Law School’s library, has edited the Yale Book of Quotations since 2006. The book has been conceived as “the most accurate, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date major quotation dictionary”: “By using state-of-the-art research methods such as searching online collections of historical periodicals and books, the YBQ revolutionizes our…
At its idealistic best, the traditional vision of American higher education was one of beauty, dynamism and diversity. With undergraduate students able to take courses from as many as 40 different professors, with requirements designed to give as broad a taste of intellectual pursuits as possible, with “shared governance” assuring that corporate-style top-down influence is…