Back in 1962, when I was first inhaling huge gulps of pop music, there was a song by Dr. Feelgood and the Interns that would occasionally surface on Atlanta top-40 stations. It contains these lines: You’ve got the right string, baby But the wrong yo-yo Somebody knocking on your door Well, I passed this morning…
In its July 9 issue, the Albuquerque Journal-News reports that the administration at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) is now complaining about being inundated with public-records requests. Written by T.S. Last, the article “NNMC Claims That It Is Overburdened by IPRA Requests” is available at: http://www.abqjournal.com/426873/abqnewsseeker/nnmc-claims-its-overburdened-by-ipra-requests.html. (IPRA apparently is the acronym for Inspection of Public…
Over on my personal blog, I write a lot about MOOCs. You might say I’m more than a little MOOC-obsessed, but I really am trying to develop other interests. That effort ran aground this week when a Massive Open Online Course at the University of Zurich basically imploded. It’s a confusing story (the Chronicle report on…
The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions. This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to…
While the intellectual in me has always been a bit suspicious or patronizing of persons who read their daily devotional or Bible, I must confess that I have turned to literature in my life in what must be a very similar capacity. I have found comfort, reaffirmation, suffering, joy–I have been a participant and spectator…
Below is the text of a June 30 letter signed by Nathan Brown, President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and addressed to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The letter protests recent Israeli incursions into Palestinian universities on the West Bank, which it calls…
Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed four lawsuits charging that three state universities and one community college maintain unconstitutional speech codes and have restricted the free speech of students and faculty members. The institutions named in the lawsuits are Citrus College, in California, and Chicago State, Iowa State, and Ohio Universities. …
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…
The following is the text of the report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure to the AAUP Annual Meeting, delivered by Committee Chair and AAUP First Vice-President Hank Reichman on June 14. The Committee’s official and complete report will appear as part of the annual Bulletin of the AAUP, published annually in the…
At this morning’s 100th meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the AAUP membership voted unanimously to censure Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) for denying tenure to John Boyle without adequate cause and in retaliation for his department’s involvement in criticizing the administration, violating academic freedom and due process. Illinois AAUP Committee A Chair…