The National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog has yet another entry in its seeming endless series of posts predicting the imminent doom of academia. Like the world’s worst psychics, the conservative movement keeps declaring its certainty that higher education is a “bubble” and on the verge of annihilation. In reality, there is no bubble in…
The following statement was issued today, July 20, 2015: The AAUP and AFT‐Wisconsin stand together in condemning the attacks on higher education that the Wisconsin Legislature included in its biennial budget, which Governor Walker signed into law last Monday. We call on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and the UW System and campus‐level…
Wisconsin state senators struck a bipartisan deal yesterday and approved $250 million in public subsidies for a new arena for the National Basketball Association’s Milwaukee Bucks. The bill will now go to the state Assembly, where approval is likely. Just a few days ago, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a state budget that includes cuts…
In an op-ed published by the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, James Baar identifies “Four Crises That Dog Higher Education”: 1. Inflation of product cost. 2. Deflation of product value. 3. Enablement of social and moral dissolution. 4. Lower-priced, knockoff and fraudulent competition. Given the space constraints on most op-ed pieces, Baar addresses each of…
On March 3 the board of trustees of Sweet Briar College, a small liberal arts college for women in rural Virginia, made the shocking announcement that the school would close at the end of the academic year. After nearly four months of intense fund-raising and legal maneuvering, however, the college was saved. Under the terms…
By Elena Levy-Navarro, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater I write this as the state house leaders announce they have reached an agreement over the Wisconsin budget. If it is agreed upon on Thursday, they will craft the final bill. As of now, all we know about the discussions is what has been reported: namely, that…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
This comes from The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Louisiana State University system’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to uphold the firing of Teresa Buchanan, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, based on accusations she had engaged in sexual harassment and violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. F. King Alexander, the system’s president, had…
Andrew Delbanco, writing in The New York Review of Books, looks over the state of American universities, noting the promise they once represented but writing that: Today this story is stalled. At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our…
In a stunning and welcome development on the eve of a scheduled court hearing on Monday, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced today that “a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been agreed upon by Amherst County Attorney Ellen Bowyer, Saving Sweet Briar, Sweet Briar College and the Office of the Attorney General outlining a plan…