Further Revelations from the Salaita FOIAs

By Andrew Scheinman Two weeks ago I wrote a short post for academeblog.org discussing the facts I’d learned by filing Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on the Steven Salaita Affair, a post in which I also considered the follow-up investigations into that Affair by the UIUC Committee on Academic Freedom and…

Wordplay II

It has been a while since I made the initial post in what I intended to become a series. These are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories:   Back, with New Wrinkles [Title of an article on…

Even for Jindal’s Louisiana, This Seems Ludicrous

I have done a number of posts on Bobby Jindal’s political calculations and their impact on public higher education in Louisiana, and I am planning several more posts on the ongoing budget issues in the state. But I have just come across a news item that has left me scratching my head. But, first, here…

More MOOCs, More… What?

Just as he is, in many ways, the godfather to the blogs, Benjamin Franklin’s spirit stands over the baptism of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Something new and different? No. As are all children, MOOCs were birthed out of a long line of ancestors. Franklin’s Junto and subsequent libraries, the Lyceum movement, New Thought…

Why No One Will Ever Completely Master the English Language

Ahead of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Business Insider published this list of the twelve most difficult winning words in the history of the contest. No doubt, the selections have become somewhat arbitrary: that is, I am certain that there are some equally obscure and difficult alternatives available from other years. 2011: cymotrichous (adj.) — having…

A Precocious Start to an Academic and Literary Career

In one of my posts yesterday, I gave a plug to Mental Floss, highlighting three items that I found of interest that were posted on a single day in February. In another post to that site on that same day, “Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional,” Lucas Reilly chronicles…

Administrative Staffing 1987-2011, A Statistical Profile by Institution, Part 2: Alabama (Part 2) and Alaska

The federal data that is being 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 at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…