Duncan: For-Profit College Chain Guilty of Lying to DoE about Deceptive Recruiting Practices but Students Not Deceived by Those Practices

As if anyone needed further proof that Arne Duncan could not care less about students, consider his logic on the settlement reached with Education Management, the for-profit college corporation. What follows is taken from a Huffington Post article by Shahien Nasiripour: “A trio of Senate Democrats on Monday sharply rebuked outgoing Education Secretary Arne Duncan…

More on Academic Programs Subsidizing Intercollegiate Athletics

In an article for the Buffalo News, Jay Tokasz has reported yet another example of how our institutions are spending exorbitant sums to subsidize intercollegiate athletics—at the expense of academic programs and students. Here are the opening paragraphs from Tokasz article, “Small Crowds, Big Subsidy for UB Sports”:   “The price of pursuing athletic glory…

Hilarious Satirical Item on Institutional Branding

On October 1, a satirical column in the London Times Higher Education supplement included the following item:   Branding Room Only Poppleton’s Deputy Head of Brand Management, Georgina Edsel, has described a recent article in Times Higher Education on marketing techniques as ‘backward looking.’ “She particularly objected to the manner in which its author, Philip…

But Will My Robot Students Have Names? And How Will I Remember Those Names unless They Have Faces to Go with Those Names?

Here is a succinct summary from University World News of an article by Cara McGoogan that has been published by Wired: “Researchers in Japan are one step closer to their goal of getting an artificial intelligence accepted by Tokyo University. The artificial intelligence, called Todai Robot Project, has passed the standardised Japanese universities entrance exam…

The Irony of it All

The pecking order: those who teach the most students are not part of the academic elite. The pecking order: those with the fewest students are the privileged, proud elite. Those who teach the most classes are paid less than those who think about teaching. The reason for the increase in academic-fiscal mismanagement is the rise of…

AAUP Leadership in Midst of CUNY Activism

On October 20, The Excelsior, the student news site at Brooklyn College published an article titled “Brooklyn College PSC Continues to Press CUNY and the State.” At the top of the article is this photo of James Davis, who served several terms on the Executive Committee of AAUP’s national Collective Bargaining Congress, and Rudy Fichtenbaum, president…

“It’s the End of the University as We Know It”

The following piece was published originally on the website of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron. Although it addresses issues at their institution, none of those issues are specific to their institution alone. ________________________ {The title of this post] was, quite literally, the take-home message from President Scarborough’s State of the University address.…

Global Competition 2.0

This is a guest post by Laura M. Portnoi, the interim associate dean for graduate studies and research in the College of Education at California State University–Long Beach, and Sylvia S. Bagley, director of teacher leadership in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Portnoi and Bagley’s coedited essay collection (with Val D. Rust) on…