George Siemens first gained prominence in 2008 when he helped invent the massive, open, online course, better known by its acronym, the MOOC. MOOCs quickly evolved into something rather different from what Siemens had imagined, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing to head up the Gates-funded MOOC Research Initiative, which seeks to bring hard…
This week the Chronicle of Higher Education has published a series of articles from the Chronicle Review under the above heading that explore the issue of mass incarceration in America from academic perspectives. No one, including myself, will agree with everything in the five articles that have appeared, but all are thoughtful, informative, eye-opening and…
On July 9, 2015, the AAUP sent a letter to Louisiana State University (LSU) President and Chancellor Dr. F. King Alexander indicating that a supplemental report to the public record relating to the LSU administration’s existing presence on the AAUP’s censure list had been authorized. This letter came in response to the administration’s dismissal of Associate Professor…
Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
The following statement was approved by the Board of Directors of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) during the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, June 2015. Librarians have a long history and practice of defending the free expression of ideas. The “Code of Ethics of American Library Association” (2008) states that…
Yesterday I posted an entry about the AAUP Colorado Conference’s efforts to organize part-time community college faculty, who represent the overwhelming majority of community college teachers in that state. Central to these efforts has been the work of Caprice Lawless, President of the Front Range Community College AAUP Chapter and Vice-President for Community Colleges of…
Last September I posted a piece entitled “The Kids Are All Right!” in which I praised high school students in Jefferson County, Colorado, who staged mass walkouts to protest a plan by their right-wing school board to establish a curriculum-review committee to not only respond to an allegedly “leftist” AP framework but to promote patriotism,…
Last week I posted an entry on this blog encouraging readers to read an article on academic freedom and tenure by Christopher Newfield, published in Inside Higher Ed. Now Newfield has posted a kind of follow up piece, entitled Academic Freedom and the Very Serious People on the Remaking the University blog, which he edits…
Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a “major” address on higher education. As Inside Higher Ed’s account put it, his call for “a greater focus on student outcomes at colleges was an effort to pivot away from discussions that he said are focused too narrowly on the burden of student loan debt.” Duncan argues:…
In Colorado, somewhere between 70% and 80% of all community college faculty members teach part-time on term-to-term contracts. Yesterday, July 27, following the AAUP’s successful 2015 Summer Institute in Denver, AAUP-CBC President Howard Bunsis and I traveled to nearby Louisville, Colorado, to join some of those community college faculty members at a mini-Institute (the “Mini-Innie”)…