Majority Rules, the reborn blog of the New Faculty Majority, has a call for contributors: We’re looking for contributions from contingent faculty and allies across the country and anywhere else contingency is a problem for faculty, covering a large number of issues and topics that will help us make and enforce those new rules. This…
This comes from The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Louisiana State University system’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to uphold the firing of Teresa Buchanan, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, based on accusations she had engaged in sexual harassment and violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. F. King Alexander, the system’s president, had…
Andrew Delbanco, writing in The New York Review of Books, looks over the state of American universities, noting the promise they once represented but writing that: Today this story is stalled. At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our…
Conservative pundit Bill Kristol tweets: “The Left’s 21st century agenda: expunging every trace of respect, recognition or acknowledgement of Americans who fought for the Confederacy.” Well, no. The ‘stars and bars’ controversy has nothing to do with heritage. Today, that flag is simply a symbol of segregation and racism. For a long time, it did…
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force,” Eric Johnson writes: This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force. Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload…
In his review of Why Information Grows, by MIT researcher and physicist César Hidalgo, University of Virginia Media Studies scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses Hidalgo’s presentation of the development of the iPhone and comments that: Hidalgo makes no mention of the state-funded research that, in reality, sparked the technology that underlies just about everything in the…
By 1970, almost everyone who had worked to create “programmed instruction” during the 1950s and 1960s had moved away from the idea of teaching machines as the centerpiece of education. These tools, they had realized, were only widely effective when in the hands of master craftspeople—that is, trained teachers who understood both the limits and…
Reporting on comments by New Jersey governor Chris Christie in Iowa on Thursday, Casey Quinlan writes: “Christie said students shouldn’t expect to receive a degree that will significantly improve their earnings for nothing.” Christie also said: But it’s also the story of how our system is supposed to work – a system where we all…
At the end of an editorial in The New York Times on the Department of Education’s decision to forgive student loans owed to Corinthian Colleges, the Editorial Board wrote: Critics are already casting this as a windfall for former students. But it is important to remember that this loan money flowed to fraudulent institutions that…