I have previously reposted a number of items by University of California at Santa Barbara Professor Christopher Newfield, taken from the “Remaking the University” blog that he runs with UCLA Professor Michael Meranze (I suggest you subscribe). The essay below was posted today under the title Top Trends for 2016 Higher Ed: Earth-Two Edition. Cleverly taking…
On Tuesday, the University of Utah’s Board of Trustees voted to abandon a ten-year-old 120-word mission statement, branded too “long-winded” and lacking in tangible goals, replacing it with a new 70-word version that Academic Senate President Bill Johnson called “a nice, tight mission statement.” According to a report in the Salt Lake Tribune, the new…
The following is the text of a press release issued January 11 by the Education Law Center: Judge James Wilson of the First Judicial District Court of Nevada (Carson City) has ruled in Lopez v. Schwartz that the state’s school voucher law (SB 302) enacted last summer by the Legislature violates two provisions of the…
Last week I posted an item on California Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed 2016-17 state budget, which falls short on higher education funding. In that post I relied heavily on the findings of the nonpartisan California Budget and Policy Center‘s “First Look” at the proposed budget. Now the Center has published another comment on the proposal,…
Yesterday’s troubling oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association has prompted a flurry of doom-and-gloom stories in the media about the potentially devastating consequences for the union movement of a decision by the high court to overturn 40 years of precedent and outlaw “agency fee” payments…
The following statement was released today and posted on the AAUP website: Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case which threatens to reverse decades-old decisions allowing for the collection of fair share fees from public employees. The case has far-reaching consequences for American workers, students and the…
The following item was posted on the blog of the UCLA Faculty Association: A poll was released by the Bay Area Council showing strong support of Californians for funding higher ed and possibly a ballot initiative to do so. When you read the poll question, it is clearly a push-poll, i.e., designed to suggest both…
Last month I posted an item about two studies demonstrating that student evaluations may not be the best way to measure either student learning or instructor effectiveness. One of those studies was co-authored by Philip Stark, chair of the statistics department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has now co-authored with Anne Boring and…