If you have watched a half-hour of any cable news program over the last several weeks, or since Donald Trump descended on an escalator and flamboyantly announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, you are aware that the media and political class are equally consumed by trying to unravel the paradox that the…
The following comes from the July 2 edition of the San Bernardino Press-Enterprise: San Bernardino Community College District Chancellor Bruce Baron has said the district will not require instructors to place disclaimers on their course descriptions in the wake of a protest by a student last month. Initially, Crafton Hills College President Cheryl Marshall said…
“Democracy cannot work unless it is honored in the factory as well as the polling booth; men cannot be truly free in body and in spirit unless their freedom extends into the places where they earn their daily bread.” Senator Robert F. Wagner Yesterday, July 5, marked the 80th anniversary of the signing of the…
The following resolution was released by the two organizations on June 30: The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), as the two national scholarly associations devoted to the study of all education and higher education, respectively, affirm the principle that academic freedom, grounded in the tenure…
This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent and important article by Beth McMurtrie entitled, “Nearly a Year Later, Fallout From Salaita Case Lingers on Campuses.” It is definitely worth reading, and not just because I’m quoted in it several times. The article also provides an opportunity for some further reflection on the…
Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, Chloe Baker reports: “Aspiring teachers who can’t spell or count will no longer graduate, with a new national literacy and numeracy exam being introduced in Australia’s universities. . . . A pilot program will be introduced in August. Student teachers tested as part of the pilot will still graduate even if they…
Writing for University World News, John Kelly reports on the debate over an academic boycott of Israeli universities that is now occurring in Ireland. Kelly notes that the issue has become prominent in Ireland considerably later than in most member nations of the European Union, 14 of which have governmentally endorsed the boycott. In Ireland,…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
Bloch, Robert. Psycho. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. The enduring popularity of Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation has insured that Psycho will remain the novvel with which Robert Bloch is most identified. Much of the substantial body of work that Bloch produced belongs to the horror genre and other categories of speculative fiction. Despite its…
In an op-ed published by the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, James Baar identifies “Four Crises That Dog Higher Education”: 1. Inflation of product cost. 2. Deflation of product value. 3. Enablement of social and moral dissolution. 4. Lower-priced, knockoff and fraudulent competition. Given the space constraints on most op-ed pieces, Baar addresses each of…