The Little University

David Brooks wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times the other day called “The Big University.” It’s not a bad piece: It argues that the humanities are a necessary underpinning for professional specialization and points out “four important tasks” for institutions wanting to move back toward a position where “they leave a mark…

Among School Children: A Review of Steven Salaita’s "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom"

This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…

Is Anybody Home?

Something has happened to the way I read scholarly articles.  Unless I can sense a person behind the words, I drift off. No more “objectivity” for me, thank you. Give me the same information, but let me know who is providing it, and why I should trust them. This is beginning to prove to be…

Here At MFU

Here at Margaret Farmer University, we’ve an academic tradition going back fifty years, to our days as an agricultural college. Founded by the Farmer family, we are named after our first president, whose brother was the college’s first Chief Fiscal Officer. The older generation of the Farmer family, known affectionately as “Ma” and “Pa,” set…

Outrageous moves to foster runaway salaries for administrators

Michael Behrent, the president of the Appalachian State University chapter of the AAUP, and John Steen, Program Coordinator of Scholars for North Carolina’s Future (with contribution from Jim Carmichael, professor at UNC Greensboro and president of the AAUP’s North Carolina Conference) have an op-ed today in The News & Observer or Raleigh, NC entitled “Outrageous move to foster runaway…

Education Reform Whack-a-Mole

The education “reform” movement of the United States has roots going as far back as school desegregation and busing in the 1960s and the increase in numbers of private schools that resulted and, to a lesser degree, from the rise of the home-schooling movement.  Both of these drew students from the public schools, primarily students who…