In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had to say yesterday during oral arguments over the case, Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which centers on the constitutionality of admissions criteria that take race into consideration as one factor, what remains of the principle of…
Early in his controversial 14-year tenure as Chancellor of the California State University system, Charles Reed notoriously told a public audience that faculty members work only two or three days a week from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The comment sparked a firestorm of protest, but it sadly reflected an all too common perception among…
Two days ago I posted an item, Questioning Student Evaluations, which reported on two studies that call into doubt the utility of student evaluations of teaching as a mechanism for determining teacher effectiveness. In response, AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, an economist, shared the following paper, adapted from an FAQ he prepared years ago for faculty…
Academic Analytics, a private database contracted to measure faculty productivity at Rutgers, may undermine our tenure process, while narrowing the range of scholarship. If you belong to SASNB [School of Arts and Sciences—New Brunswick], please attend the School’s faculty meeting on Monday, 14 December from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in Voorhees 105 (College Ave.) to vote on…
These statistics include, of course, millennials who have not attended or completed college, but given that the percentages for both attending and completing college are higher for their generation than for any previous generation, I think that it is very safe to suggest that the debt loads and employment prospects of those who have attended…
Very obviously, we have every reason to fear Islamic extremists who may wish to replicate a large-scale attack on the U.S. comparable in scope to the 9/11 attacks, or perhaps even worse. But the Islamic religion of the San Bernardino mass murderers has taken our attention completely away from the immediately preceding massacre at the…
The following is a brief new item published on the website of WATE-16 [http://wjhl.com/2015/12/07/university-of-tennessee-faculty-support-cheek-hall-on-workplace-holiday-party-guidelines/]: “While lawmakers are calling for Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and Vice Chancellor Rickey Hall to resign amid controversy over University of Tennessee Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s workplace holiday party guidelines, the faculty senate said they support the chancellor and vice chancellor.…
Writing for the Washington Post, Will Hobson and Steven Rich have provided a terrific investigative piece of the escalating practice of subsidizing intercollegiate athletics with student fees and monies previously allocated to academic programs: “At Texas A&M University, the president’s proposal to charge all 50,000 students $72 a year to help pay for a $450…