A Newspaper Report on Administrative Bloat: Some Remarks on the Sum of the Details and on Some of the Specific Details
On September, 17, an investigative article by Lance Lambert and Josh Sweigart was published in the Dayton Daily News. Its title is “’Bloat’ Driving Rise in Tuition; Administrative Pay Rising Faster than Cost for Instruction.” For too long, administrators have been, at best, acquiescing to and, at worst, reinforcing to state legislators and to the public…
U.S. Higher Education News for September 17, 2015
Addo, Koran. “Degrees Earned by UMSL’s Minority Students Jump 18 Percent in a Year.” St Louis Post-Dispatch 17 Sep. 2015: A, 13. Of all the things University of Missouri-St. Louis Chancellor Thomas George said during his annual State of the University address on Wednesday, the most eye-popping was his revelation that the number of…
Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 11-12.
Condon, Richard. Prizzi’s Honor. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geogehan, 1982. Prizzi’s Honor brought Richard Condon to more attention than any of his books, with the possible exception of The Manchurian Candidate (1959). With Janet Roach, Condon co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of the novel, directed by John Huston and starring Jack…
Administrative Staffing 1987-2011, A Statistical Profile by Institution, Part 15: Florida, Part 2
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
That Was Then; This is Now: Part 2
This is a re-post from Ana Fores-Tamayo’s’ blog Adjunct Justice [http://adjunct-justice.blogspot.com/]. Given that the issue of undocumented immigrants in the United States has moved to the forefront during this year’s still nascent presidential campaign, and given that much of the discussion of immigration has been quite generalized and abstract, this sort of personalized perspective on…
U.S. Higher Education News for September 16, 2015
Bramson, Kate. “Life-Sciences Firm Nabsys Closes, Says Stockholder; DNA-Sequencing Firm Was Seen as Star Startup in State.” Providence Journal [RI] 16 Sep. 2015: A, 8. . . . Nabsys founder and former CEO Dr. Barrett W. Bready on Tuesday would neither confirm nor deny whether the company has closed, but said “a lot” of…
The Corporatized Globalization of Higher Education and Cotton Picking in Tajikistan
We read a great deal about the internationalization of higher education—which, in many contexts, is simply a catchphrase for the corporate provision of digitalized higher education through conglomerates such as Laureate, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. But if this one-size-fits-all approach to education has created all sorts of issues in North America and Europe, it is inevitably…
Offering Non-Partisan Alternatives to the Relentless Tax Cutting Promoted by ALEC and the Club for Growth
The Ohio Conference provides some financial support to One Ohio Now, a non-partisan group advocating common-sense tax policies that actually meet the needs of our state—that provide sufficient funding of our state’s public institutions, public services, and physical and digital infrastructures. Yesterday, I came across the following news item reporting that a similar group has…
Educationalists. (Yes, They Mean Us.)
The Glasgow Herald has published a short item with the headline “Educationalists Ready to Learn.” The cynic in me immediately wondered whether “educationalist” was some new corporate coinage created to reframe and to devalue the essential role of “faculty” in higher education. But if the headline writer was influenced by corporatization, that influence has probably…