Performance Funding Is Only Increasing the Problems That It Is Ostensibly Supposed to Solve

The Community College Research Center at the Columbia University Teachers College has released a report on “Unintended Impacts of Performance Funding on Community Colleges and Universities in Three States.” The full text of this CCRC Working Paper No. 78 is available at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/unintended-impacts-performance-funding.pdf. The report’s authors are Hana Lahr, Lara Pheatt, Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya…

CFP: Neoliberalism and Public Higher Education

In order to promote critical reflection and public discussions on the impact of neoliberalism on higher education the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University is hosting a national conference on “Neoliberalism and Public Higher Education” at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in East Lansing, Michigan, on March 27 – 28, 2015. Critical topics…

Ebola Is Just the New Chandra Levy

Three weeks ago, Ebola was an all-consuming crisis that obsessed politicians and the media. But now, it’s just an old issue and old news. People are still dying in droves in substandard medical facilities in West Africa, and nothing much has changed in terms of our efforts to insure that the disease is contained when…

Votes of No Confidence in Minnesota

At this past June’s annual meeting, a chapter leader suggested that AAUP ought to start tracking votes of no confidence—even if not as formally as it tracks its own investigations and censures of institutions for violations of the AAUP’s core principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure/economic security. As it is now, a vote…

Wishing Doesn’t Make It So

After the 2012 presidential election, it became apparent that Mitt Romney was very surprised that he lost the election because his internal polling had indicated that he was not just ahead, but solidly ahead, in most of the key battleground states. Progressives found that disconnection from reality quite amusing and attributed it, in Bill Maher’s…

October Jobs Report: Under the Sunny Headline, Deep Roots of Discontent

The following post was written by Isaiah J. Poole for for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Riger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for…

Politics Is Both Message and Messaging

The most important paragraph in Isaiah Poole’s piece seems to me to be the following: “Here’s where the tragedy of Tuesday’s election results come into sharp relief. Republicans were more successful than Democrats in tapping into voters’ economic anxiety, even with their record of blocking the policy changes needed to address the causes of that…

Koch Money at Colleges and Universities: Part I, A-M

In an earlier post, “The Koch Brothers Gifts to Higher Ed Come with Many Strings Attached” [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/18/the-koch-brothers-gifts-to-higher-ed-come-with-many-strings-attached/], I discussed the decision by Brooklyn College to decline a gift from the Koch Brothers Foundation. To all appearances, it is one of the few colleges to have made such a decision. A former colleague once said that…