In one of my recent reviews of recent news items on higher education [https://academeblog.org/2015/10/23/u-s-higher-education-news-from-september-29-2015/], I opened with an item on the elimination of continuing contracts for faculty at Florida State College. Now the member of the college’s board of trustees who initiated that change of policy has been emboldened to advance a proposal that faculty…
This is an op-ed written by John McNay, president of the Ohio Conference, and published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: Gov. John Kasich’s task force on affordability and efficiency in higher education released its recommendations to the General Assembly recently, and the results were to be expected. The task force was headed by Geoff Chatas,…
Writing for Nation of Change, Paul Buchheit has provided a very succinct but comprehensive overview of how corporatization has had a very damaging impact on higher education. In his article “Higher Education: Capitalism at Its Most Despicable,” Buchheit focuses on five inter-linked phenomena that are undermining the value of higher education because they undermine the…
In “OSU Fund Managers Pig Out: Scholarships Not Awarded to Students,” an article published by the Columbus Free Press, John Lasker has focused on Ohio State University’s growing endowment and on the degree to which those assets are benefitting the students who attend the university. Here are some of the relevant facts, culled from Lasker’s…
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Apollo Education Group, the for-profit education company that operates the University of Phoenix, “is getting destroyed” on the stock market. Dawn Bilodeau, Chief of the Defense Department’s Voluntary Education Program, had released the following statement: “The institution will not be authorized access to DoD installations for the purposes…
Recently we’ve seen a growing amount of attention paid to secret searches for university presidents and the appointment as a consequence of such searches of non-educators who may push a corporatizing agenda, including at the University of Iowa, Miami University, and the University of North Carolina. Last week David A. Sanders, Associate Professor of Biological…
Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…
The following op-ed titled, “AAUP: Miami U Making a Big Mistake,” was published several weeks ago in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The authors are Karen Dawisha and Keith Tuma, co-presidents of the Miami University chapter of AAUP, and John McNay, president of the AAUP’s Ohio Conference. _________________________ Last week, news emerged that the Miami University board…
The document offers a faculty perspective on the health and leadership of The University of Akron, as well as a vision for the future. Akron, OHIO – October 20, 2015 – As part of the Akron-AAUP organized event happening Tuesday, in conjunction with the ‘State of the University’ address, the Akron-AAUP has published and will…