How to Fight for Education Funding
Maybe some of us in higher education might think about what these K-12 teachers in Washington State have done, as reported in Labor Notes: Lawmakers in Washington state are scrambling to get ready for a special session after the state’s highest court announced it will start charging a penalty of $100,000 per day while legislators…
California Task Force Recommends Replacing ACCJC
If you have been following my long series of posts about the accreditation controversy at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), you are aware that I have been one of many critics of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), an independent entity of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) charged…
To Paraphrase Winston Churchill, We Are in Some Ways Separated from Our Students by Our Ostensibly Common Language
For the first time, this year’s Mindset List includes an addendum—a list of slang words that will be familiar to most members of the class of 2019 and that presumably have become more widely used, even if they were not coined, over this past year. The list includes somewhat conversational definitions of the terms and…
Selected Items from the Mindset List for the Class of 2019
2. Google has always been there, in its founding words, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” 3. They have never licked a postage stamp. 14. Cell phones have become so ubiquitous in class that teachers don’t know which students are using them to take notes and which ones are planning a…
Working One’s Way through College while Earning Minimum Wage
The following map was included in an article by Libby Nelson, published by Vox. The map originally appeared in an article by Sandhya Kambhampati and Meredith Myers in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It shows how long it would take a student working half-time at a minimum wage job to earn enough to cover one…
The US, India, Academic Freedom and the World
People are the same everywhere, I guess. That cliche stared me in the face this morning, when I saw over 30 new comments on the statement we published signed by a long list of scholars on the upcoming visit by Indian Prime Minister Naarendra Modi to a Silicon Valley. Five more have appeared while I’ve…
U.S. Politics for "Tech Nerds" (and Everyone Else)
I usually try to limit my posts on this blog to issues directly involving higher education. But as AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum has pointed out, “the attack on higher education as a public good is a political attack” that “requires us to respond by entering the arena of politics.” And today, via Paul Krugman’s blog,…
For a Union, Passivity Equates to a Loss of Collective Bargaining Rights
Yesterday’s NLRB’s decision on the collective-bargaining rights of employees hired through “temp” agencies has meant that very little attention has been paid to a decision handed down yesterday by an NLRB Administrative Law Judge. Although the change in how contingent employees are defined has potentially broad direct ramifications and signals an important, fundamental shift in…
Where shared governance goes to die.
I’ve had a strange fascination with an education start-up called Minerva for some time now. They’re a Silicon-Valley inspired online operation that has actually enrolled students now. Yet unlike so many other for-profit education ventures they’ve always aspired to be highly selective – the first “Online Ivy.” I think the source of my fascination stems…