Janet D. Stemwedel started off June with an explanation as to why she can no longer donate to her alma mater: As a professor at San José State University, a teaching-focused institution in the California State University system, I am teaching a very different student population than Wellesley’s. Approximately half of our students are first-generation…
A May Day reprinting of an article by Jack Rasmus concluded: That condition of the 100 million plus working families in America today, International Labor Day 2014, is as lamentable as the accelerating accrual of income and wealth by the 1% is disgusting. Of course, the two trends are not mutually exclusive but directly related.…
“April is the… ” nope, not going there! Michael DeCesare posted a letter from women faculty at Merrimack College to the president of the University of Southern Maine that includes this: We write to request that you rescind the cuts you have made to the fulltime faculty in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social…
[For the previous month, February, go here.] Hank Reichman began the month by considering the decline of shared governance at Ft. Lewis College, exemplified by a change in course structure in relation to creits: shared governance is the issue at FLC and it is an issue that should concern faculty everywhere. To be sure, the…
This review of the past year, month by month, started with January, found here. A guest post by Cecil Canton toward the beginning of the month describes the “cultural taxation” faced by faculty from underrepresented groups, “a way to describe the unique burden placed on ethnic minority faculty in carrying out our responsibility for service…
One of the first contributions to the Academe blog this year was Hank Reichman’s “How NOT to Oppose the Academic Boycott of Israel.” He wrote: Clearly, college and university presidents have the right to speak out on issues of public concern, especially as these relate to higher education. And while their statements may or may not represent…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 370,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 16 days for that many people to see…
Education “reformers,” in an attempt to save the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), are now attempting to decouple “standards” and “high-stakes testing.” In an op-ed in The New York Times today, for example, David Kirp, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, writes: Although the Obama administration didn’t craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using some of…
When I returned to teaching more than a dozen years ago, I taught a great deal of developmental writing. At that time, the City University of New York (CUNY) used an entrance exam for First Year Composition (FYC) placement whose prompt instructed students to write a persuasive letter, generally addressed to either school (often college) or…
A new post on Retraction Watch, “Peer review isn’t good at ‘dealing with exceptional or unconventional submissions,’ says study,” quotes the authors of the study of the title: Because most new ideas tend to be bad ideas, resisting unconventional contributions may be a reasonable and efficient default instinct for evaluators. However, this is potentially problematic because unconventional work…