An Open Letter to Allan Bense, Florida State University Board of Trustees Chair, and Florida Governor Rick Scott

Dear Chairman Bense and Governor Scott: The battle over FSU’s next President seems to have slowed, except that the FSU Board of Trustees (BOT) has silently “postponed” its Aug. 26th meeting. This meeting was the last chance for Chair Allan Bense to answer the overwhelming call to restructure the Presidential Search Advisory Committee (PSAC) before…

Inequality: A Broad Middle Class Requires Empowering Workers

This post was written by Robert Borsage 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 America’s Future, the…

Mills College Becomes the First Single-Gender College to Admit Transgender Students

There are currently 119 single-gender colleges and universities in the United States. Mills College in Oakland, California, has become the first of those institutions to admit transgender students. The college’s undergraduate admission policy on “transgender or gender questioning- applicants” now permits “applicants whose gender identity does not match their legally assigned sex” as of the…

When Congressional Staff Become Wikipedia Contributors

The following passage is excerpted from a news report from The Hill: “For days, someone in the House had been editing multiple pages related to transgender issues that critics called ‘transphobic.’ The situation came to a head this week when the person changed the description of Orange Is the New Black actor Laverne Cox from…

National (In-)Security: Fifty Notable American Espionage Novels: 46-48.

  Sinclair, Upton.  World’s End.  New York: Viking, 1940. Now known primarily for his muckraking fiction and journalism, in particular for his novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair also produced a series of eleven espionage novels featuring an operative named Lanny Budd.  What is most unusual about the series is that Sinclair sought to chronicle systematically…

PBS NewsHour Series on “Rethinking College”

Lil Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, has shared the following information which should be of broad interest. The PBS NewsHour contacted the CFHE leadership about CFHE’s take on MOOCs and online higher education. The producers had seen CFHE’s video on the topic on the CFHE website and wanted to have “another perspective” about…

Is “Google Science” about to Transform the Publication of Scientific Papers, or Is It All an Elaborate Hoax?

Someone has disseminated what purports to be a portion of a presentation on Google’s progress in developing “Google Science,” an open-source platform for the publication of scientific papers that might radically transform not just the way in which the results of scientific research are disseminated but also the ways in which scientific research is conducted.…

State Legislation on Online Postsecondary Education Passed from January to July 2014

Colorado CO S 114 2014 State University Global Campus Student Access Status: Enacted – Act No. 144 Date of Last Action:*  05/02/2014 – Enacted Author: Todd (D) Topics: Postsecondary, Postsecondary-Community and Junior Colleges, Distance/online/virtual learning Summary: Amends the role and mission of Colorado State University global – campus on-line university to permit baccalaureate degree programs instead of upper-division baccalaureate completion…

What Helps Students Learn?

An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The push for doing education on the cheap has led to a number of “innovations” nearly always touted as ways to “do more with less.” But the data on these experiments increasingly present a more complicated picture of their…