Below is the UIUC news release, which is posted here: http://uofi.uillinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/77294.html Phyllis M. Wise steps aside as Urbana-Champaign campus chancellor Returns to faculty role, effective August 12 August 6, 2015 URBANA–University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise announced in a statement today that she will step aside as chancellor and vice president of the…
The title of this post is, of course, a misleading tease if you, the reader, are expecting some sort of summary of Donald Trump’s positions on higher-education issues. The Trump campaign’s website includes no “issues” section presenting the candidate’s positions on higher education or on anything else. So, what is the point of this post?…
Steven Salaita, a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies program, was fired a year ago with a summary dismissal for tweets that were construed as lacking civility. A federal judge, Harry D. Leinenweber of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, has ruled against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
George Siemens first gained prominence in 2008 when he helped invent the massive, open, online course, better known by its acronym, the MOOC. MOOCs quickly evolved into something rather different from what Siemens had imagined, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing to head up the Gates-funded MOOC Research Initiative, which seeks to bring hard…
The most recent issue of Academe displays on its cover a Bob Dylan lyric: “I’ll Tell It and Think It and Speak It and Breathe It.” An image appears at the upper left-hand corner of this webpage. Its provenance is the epic protest song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Editor Aaron Barlow deftly situates the song on the cusp of the…
This week the Chronicle of Higher Education has published a series of articles from the Chronicle Review under the above heading that explore the issue of mass incarceration in America from academic perspectives. No one, including myself, will agree with everything in the five articles that have appeared, but all are thoughtful, informative, eye-opening and…
After this past week’s penultimate episode, it is clear that the crime that set much of the current action in motion occurred two decades earlier. During the 1992 L.A. race riots, several corrupt Vinci police officers committed an armed robbery of a jewelry store, with the most conspicuous loot being a set of exquisite blue…
On July 9, 2015, the AAUP sent a letter to Louisiana State University (LSU) President and Chancellor Dr. F. King Alexander indicating that a supplemental report to the public record relating to the LSU administration’s existing presence on the AAUP’s censure list had been authorized. This letter came in response to the administration’s dismissal of Associate Professor…
This post is being written as much in response to chhanks’ comment on Hank Reichman’s post, excerpting Vincent J. Roscingo’s article in Counterpunch, as to the post itself. In the comment, chhanks asks: “Can anyone at the AAUP tells what percentage of current university and college administrators were tenured faculty members before becoming administrators?” With…