BY MONICA OWENS In support of the launch of our national Education Not Privatization campaign this week we interviewed David Hughes, vice president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers University to learn more about how the Rutgers chapter successfully organized to defend academic freedom and exercised oversight of online offerings in the Rutgers-Pearson eCollege contract.…
BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
BY ED BURMILA The following is reposted with permission from The Outline. Ed Burmila is assistant professor of political science at Bradley University. The 2014 right-wing fever dream of a film God’s Not Dead, a fantasy version of higher education for young adults raised on the Left Behind series, is a comic masterpiece, at least…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. The biggest mainstream media higher ed story last week–and this–has been the lawsuit charging Harvard with discrimination against Asian American applicants. My piece on it has been delayed by…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE FACULTY POLICIES COMMITTEE At a time when tenure is under attack in the American academy, it is heartening to be able to offer some good news. By a message sent on October 10, 2018, Devorah Lieberman, President of the University of La Verne, announced that, “The Board of Trustees,…
BY MARK HULSETHER In my last post, I argued that “refereed” does not equal good, nor “non-refereed” bad—but rather “refereed or not” and “quality scholarship or not” (alongside other factors) are independent variables with approximately random correlation, at least in the intellectual networks where I do my work. I did not expect to see slam…
BY DANIEL WEIMER, DARIN MCGINNIS, DANIEL O’HARE, AND JEFF RUTHERFORD Wheeling Jesuit University is a small, mission-driven university that, due to years of administrative turnover, has consistently been faced with financial challenges. In early 2017, our Board of Trustees hired Dr. Debra Townsley to engineer a “turnaround” at WJU to alleviate our serious long-term debt.…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This piece is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Many people are worried about the damage the Kavanaugh appointment will do to the Supreme Court and to American politics. I’m worried about the new damage…
BY FRANK VON HIPPEL Like many Americans, I felt distressed about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science and scientists following the 2016 election, especially as those attacks related to critical environmental issues such as climate change and pollution. I participated in the March for Science, but at the same time pondered what I could do…
BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald…