The following is the text of a talk that I delivered on March 30, 2015 at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, as part of the Spring Semester Centennial Speakers Series. The series celebrates the centennial of the AAUP and the contributions of all those who have served within leadership positions in the WSU AAUP…
The following is the Executive Summary of a report issued recently by the California Faculty Association, which represents all faculty in the 23-campus California State University system. The report is the second in a series. The first paper in this series, “Race to the Bottom: CSU’s 10-Year Failure to Fund Its Core Mission,” examined faculty…
Here at WordPress.com, we‘re always looking for ways to improve the blogging experience. We pride ourselves on taking your suggestions to heart and work tirelessly to create better tools for you. Today, we’re releasing a game changer. As WordPress.com becomes easier to use, one piece of unanswered feedback keeps nagging at us: blogging is hard!…
Aaron Barlow’s post today concerns legislation proposed in North Carolina that will uniformly increase teaching loads at all public universities to four courses per semester. I might look at this kind of legislation somewhat differently if the Far Right was interested in funding public higher education at any reasonable level and some legislators were, in…
If the dateline on this story had been a day later, I would not believe it (hat tip to Diane Ravitch for linking to it): “Bill would require all UNC professors to teach heavy course load.” Apparently, a state senator named Tom McInnis from Richmond, NC has introduced a bill to that effect: “There is no…
What I am about to recount did not occur on April Fool’s Day, but the story is in that vein. When I was in graduate school, another graduate teaching fellow asked me to participate in a hoax. In her freshman composition class, the assigned readings were the script of Orson Welles’s infamous radio dramatization of…
For April Fools Day, the Library of Congress has provided materials related to the following hoax to educators who wish to make use of their digital collections of primary sources: “April Fools Day pranks are usually fairly short term: An entire class simultaneously falls asleep or a teacher assigns a forty-page essay due the next…
Tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita, last night, filed a response to the University of Illinois motion to dismiss his civil rights lawsuit against the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois officials and donors. The response lays out the underlying constitutional, contractual and tort-based claims at the heart of the lawsuit and addresses how the complaint alleges…
In a review titled “The End of College? Not So Fast,” published by the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, Donald E. Heller provides a very thoughtful and substantive critique of Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. You may recall that I discussed Blaine Grateman’s review…
All day the talking heads on cable news have been debating whether the new Indiana law protecting “religious freedom” is actually a bill sanctioning biased treatment of LGBT individuals. A number Far-Right mouthpieces have tried to mount a defense of the law and of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whose inability either to provide any coherent…