Want good schools? Then train teachers well, pay them a competitive wage and give them the resources they need. It’s that simple. Really. Yet, for the past decade-and-a-half, we’ve been trying anything, anything at all, to prove this wrong. Though educational policy disaster has followed upon educational policy disaster, our leaders and our journalists continue…
My father used to ask a student to draw a line a meter long on the blackboard, take a look and tell the student the length was not right. “Practice,” he would say, “until you get it right.” That truncated part of my father’s lesson seems to be the model for contemporary American educational policy.…
It turns out that Martin Shkreli endowed an NYU professorship, the Martin Shkreli Professor of Pediatric Nephrology. Current holder is Howard Trachtman who, according to The Huffington Post, “previously served as a consultant at Retrophin, where Shkreli was CEO.” The article goes on to quote NYU spokesperson Lisa Greiner, “We reviewed potential conflicts of interests at each…
One of the advantages of starting an academic career late in life is the understanding of the workplace and of people one brings into the new activities. One of the advantages, also, is that one is unlikely to have grandiose visions of a life in the ivied towers of a research institution. Unless one is…
A colleague of mine went on a public tirade this fall against the use of numbers of citations in decisions on tenure and promotion. Hers may have been an intentionally self-serving rant, but she has a point. The amount of attention a paper or book brings—or even its usefulness to other scholars—has little to do…
The following is a press release from the Professional Staff Congress representing faculty at the City University of New York: New York—Senator Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate and Brooklyn native, is calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo to invest in the City University of New York and fund a fair union contract for CUNY faculty and staff.…
The following is a press release from the Professional Staff Congress representing faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY): New York—Governor Cuomo’s veto of legislation to protect educational quality for a half-million mostly low-income CUNY students undermines CUNY’s ability to offer an excellent education and betrays the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers…
Even if Donald Trump were not such a looming threat to the United States and its traditions, he would still be a perfect teaching tool for use in Introduction to Journalism classes. If I could go back an redesign my syllabus for this fall semester, I would make it all about the coverage of Trump—not…