There is a vote of no confidence coming up at the City University of New York. It involves the Pathways program that is being imposed upon the system by a board of trustees and central administration with very little understanding of how any of its colleges operate “on the ground.” Pathways is being instituted with…
One of the outgrowths of the reduction in tenure-track lines, the growing number of candidates for any academic job, and the willingness of college and university administrations to rely on adjunct workers to teach lower-level courses has been an increasing timidity on the part of those lucky enough to find themselves on the tenure track.…
It was only last fall that I heard of the Edwin Mellen Press. I was sent a book to review for Choice, which presents very short descriptive and generally positive reviews for the use of librarians. By Jason Mosser, The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles proved…
Writer and teacher John Warner lists his thoughts on automated essay grading for InsideHigherEd. He comes up with 22. For me, the ones that stand out are these: 6. … Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task. Grading writing, while time consuming and occasionally unpleasant,…
“What we’re struggling with is a president who has a mission that doesn’t apparently involve active involvement in university life,” said Thomas Prusa, a professor of economics. “Maybe if the president was more tuned in, he would think that we have 58,000 students, 18 to 22 years old, and what exactly is happening? He is throwing…
New York University sociology professor Jeff Goodwin writes in today’s New York Times: Should administrators be able to enrich themselves… at educational institutions? N.Y.U. is not a Wall Street firm, but a tax-exempt university that gets millions in taxpayer dollars, not least from student loans. In fact, our students have the highest total debt load of any…
Proponents of standardized testing often set up the straw-man argument that we need assessment and that those against their favored tests, therefore, must be against testing completely. This is nonsense, of course. And soon it will be moot. We are beginning to see the consequences of our testing mania. And they are not good.
Those of us who teach composition know the difficulty of convincing students to think of audience as they write: Just who are they addressing? What do they expect in response? Why are they saying something? Writing is about convincing, entertaining, conveying, demanding, contacting…. However you describe it, writing is as much a two-way street as talking.…
Last week, I finished the manuscript of a book (it will be called The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, in case anyone is interested, and it should appear in August). It is caught up in history and historicism, culture and commentary–in what other people have written. While writing, I was surrounded…