The Cold Facts about Higher Education and Contingent Faculty Appointments
This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] Although the details are shameful, it’s good to see the mainstream press publicizing the facts about higher education faculty appointments and compensation. A recent NBC report highlights these facts from the most recent annual survey…
Not Just Appalling, but Hypocritical and Illogical, Too
It is a common tactic among bullies to be absolutely blind to their own insensitivity toward others while being hypersensitive to any perceived slights against them. And that truism has never been on display more absurdly and hypocritically than at this year’s NRA Convention in Texas. Amid all of the hyperventilated rhetoric about President Obama’s…
The Quest for Shared Governance at Boston College
The following piece is being re-posted from the Catholic Higher Education Advocate [http://cheausa.org/], which reprinted it from The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper. The Catholic Higher Education Advocate is currently including this op-ed as part of a broader feature story, “Battle Intensifies at Boston College over Shared Governance,” covering the public back and forth between the Boston…
Campaigning Isn’t Governing, Sound Bytes Aren’t Journalism, and MOOCs Aren’t Education
The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…
Right to Work, by the Numbers: Part 4
Historic Highs and Lows in Unemployment In my previous post in this series, I closed by noting that proponents of “right to work” might very well want to emphasize that eight of the ten states with the lowest current unemployment averages are “right to work” states. Those states are Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, South…
Review of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 6 Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham U P, 2008. In this seminal work of the corporatization of American universities, Frank Donoghue offers a much longer historical view than most other authors focusing…
Student Debt as a Consequence of Left-Wing Indoctrination
The following e-mail is from World Net Daily, which represents a worldview somewhere quite to the right of National Review, American Spectator, and RedStates. It is worth the few minutes that it will take to read the e-mail to gain a clearer (if more mind-boggling) sense of what folks on that far-right edge of the…
Ohio: Where Oxymoronic Legislation Proliferates like Fracking Platforms
The following mission statement is taken directly from the website for the Clean Ohio Fund: “The Clean Ohio Fund restores, protects, and connects Ohio’s important natural and urban places by preserving green space and farmland, improving outdoor recreation, and cleaning up brownfields to encourage redevelopment and revitalize communities.” More specifically, the site delineates the ways…
Photographs of Abandoned Spaces and Reflections on a Neglected Novelist
Huffington Post recently ran a series of photographs of an abandoned farmhouse in which all of the previous occupants’ furniture and other belongings have been left to gather dust. Here are several of those photos: The rest of the photographs in this series can be found at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/abandoned-farmhouse_n_3163713.html These photographs reminded me of the haunting…