Let’s face it: The traditional peer-review process was not meant for a digital age. It needs to be altered (not abandoned) so that it once again has a consistently useful function, working as something other than a wall to be breached. It needs to help move the best of scholarship to the fore while providing…
And what about one who moves a trashcan (for whatever reason)… should that instructor be fired? This has not been a good week on the academic-freedom front. First, a Research Associate at Florida State University named Deborah O’Connor resigned after posting comments on Facebook like “Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your…
“It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom which is the subject of this report is that of the teacher,” says the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Freedom. The 1940 Statement follows up: Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their…
Thomas Frank, perhaps best known for What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an examination of America’s new conservatism, has an article in Salon, “The New Republic, the torture report, and the TED talks geniuses who gutted journalism.” Toward the end, he writes this: The new press lord’s deeds are all made possible by the shrinking significance of everyone…
At its idealistic best, the traditional vision of American higher education was one of beauty, dynamism and diversity. With undergraduate students able to take courses from as many as 40 different professors, with requirements designed to give as broad a taste of intellectual pursuits as possible, with “shared governance” assuring that corporate-style top-down influence is…
In an article today on the debacle at The New Republic, journalist (and former TNR staffer) Michael Kinsley is quoted in reference to new owner Chris Hughes, “It’s his magazine, and if he wants to wreck it, he can.” This could easily become the tagline for the current age. Certainly for the boards of trustees of our institutions of…
The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation by Anthony Cody (New York: Garn Press, 2014). Though this book may have been sparked by an exchange between an experienced science teacher (Anthony Cody) and the Gates Foundation on Cody’s blog for Education Week, “Living in Dialogue,” and on the Foundation’s blog, “Impatient Optimists,” it…
A version of Hank Reichman’s August post “Usual Suspects Saying the Usual Things: Critiquing the Schmidt Report” has appeared in the December, 2014 issue of the Clarion, the monthly newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union at the City University of New York. Titled “Schmidt: reduce faculty authority” in the print version and “Benno…
“Non-negotiable.” From Texas legislators adding new standardized tests to David Coleman defending his Common Core State Standards, that’s how education “reformers” present their changes. After all, they know better than we do. The problem with American education, they argue, is that too many constituencies have been involved in decision-making, from parents to teachers to school…