On May 16-18, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education’s 7th National Gathering drew nearly 100 faculty, student and organizational leaders to the Desmond Hotel in Albany, New York, where the organization held panel discussions and workshops surrounding a theme of “Building Alliances for Access, Equity and Quality.” The increasing problem of student debt was…
Guild, Nicholas M. The Summer Soldier. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Guild has taught at Clemson University and Ohio State University. He has written almost a dozen novels, many dealing with espionage. For The Summer Soldier, Guild received the Ohioana Book Award. The novel focuses on a retired C.I.A. operative who returns home one…
What follows is about 10% of a long but very engaging article, “Colleges Are Full of It: Behind the Three-Decade Scheme to Raise Tuition, Bankrupt Generations, and Hypnotize the Media,” published today in Salon. Its author is Thomas Frank, who edits The Baffler magazine (which, if you haven’t read it, is well worth a visit:…
But rumor has it that Rudy Fichtenbaum, the President of the AAUP, has been nominated to be a candidate for the presidency of Florida State University. The basis of this rumor is the following letter, which appeared in my mailbox with the mysterious headnote, “WTF,” which I assume is some sort of clandestine code that…
In this morning’s e-mail, I found the following two items, one right after the other: first, from University Business, their daily newsletter with this header, “Four Shot at Seattle Pacific University,” and then from Sen. Patrick Leahy, writing for Stand with Students, “Give students a fair shot: join Elizabeth Warren and me in supporting student…
Gilman, Dorothy. The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Under her full name, Dorothy Gilman Butters wrote a dozen well-received novels for young adults from 1949 to 1963. Then, in her mid-forties, she shifted gears considerably, developing a series of adult suspense stories around the quiet adventures of an unlikely intelligence operative. Published under…
Although the more overtly political spending of the Koch brothers has received much more attention, the Walton Family Foundation has, not surprisingly, been one of the major supporters of right-wing think tanks and public-policy experiments. Long a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the…
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy. 1821. James Fenimore Cooper produced novels that became prototypes for several genres of popular fiction. In fact, his significance as an influence in this regard has a great deal to do with the resurgence in broader critical interest in his work. The Spy is the first notable American novel to…
I am posting the following letter to this blog for three reasons: (1) it illustrates the types of complex and specialized issues that state conference leaders are frequently asked to address; (2) in some instances, such as this one, the conference leadership may take the position that there simply was not enough faculty input into…
This “book” seems very analogous to the sections of the WalMart and McDonald’s websites that are devoted to “career opportunities” with those companies–as if any significant number of those in the corporate management have worked their way up from stocking shelves, working the cash registers, or putting together sandwiches. Of course, adjunct faculty have invested so…