Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
The National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog has yet another entry in its seeming endless series of posts predicting the imminent doom of academia. Like the world’s worst psychics, the conservative movement keeps declaring its certainty that higher education is a “bubble” and on the verge of annihilation. In reality, there is no bubble in…
Over the past three to four decades, Bill Cosby has received honorary degrees from the following 23 institutions that, to date, have not rescinded the degrees: Baylor University Bennett College Boston University Carnegie Mellon Colgate University Drew University Fordham University Haverford College Marquette University Oberlin College Paine College Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Sisseton Wahpeton College Swarthmore…
Yesterday, my wife and I drove to Columbus, Ohio, for the annual Dublin Irish Festival held in the suburb at the northwest corner of the I-270 beltway around the Columbus metro area. It is a festival that lives up to its advertising, with all sorts of great Celtic music and great food (Irish and otherwise)—as…
On July 30, Cathy O’Neil posted an article titled “The Manufactured Trucker Shortage” on her mathbabe blog. She opens the article with a quotation from an article in the Wall Street Journal that raises some alarm over the current shortage of long-distance trucker drivers, estimated to be about 30,000 drivers, and, worse, the projected shortage…
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…
The following news item has appeared in this week’s digital newsletter from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: “A Google search for the term ‘chief diversity officer’ delivers 5.6 million results. Many colleges and universities across the world have added an administrative post with the title of chief diversity officer in recent years. At…
The following statement was approved by the Board of Directors of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) during the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, June 2015. Librarians have a long history and practice of defending the free expression of ideas. The “Code of Ethics of American Library Association” (2008) states that…
Cary Nelson has an essay at InsideHigherEd today (along with Michael Rothberg) on the Salaita case. Here’s my comment on Nelson’s piece. First, I must note that absolutely nothing in Nelson’s essay is relevant to the actual reasons given by the chancellor and the trustees for firing Salaita. They have never questioned Salaita’s academic credentials,…