BY TAYLOR SWAAK Hi, everyone! I’m a reporter with the Chronicle of Higher Education covering technology and innovation. I’m in the midst of a newsroom report (see past examples here) on how colleges can thoughtfully, safely, and effectively partner with outside companies for services related to academic and student support. The broad umbrella of contracted services may…
BY AN ANONYMOUS SAINT CATHERINE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR Saint Catherine University sits on an idyllic green bluff in a serene part of Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s not too far from the Mississippi River. When it’s hushed, you can hear the faint sounds of a barge horn as it slowly heads down to New Orleans. It’s the…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF In my recent Washington Monthly essay, “The Banality of University Slogans,” I observed that “whether it’s ad campaigns for football season, gauzy reports from the provost, or bombast from the school’s president, higher education abounds with empty rhetoric.” In “Per Aspera ad Astra” Academe Blog contributing editor Hank Reichman shared and…
BY DANIELLE SLAUGHTER Miguel Cardona Secretary, US Department of Education Dear Secretary Cardona, My name is Danielle Slaughter, and I’m an independent scholar, digital organizer, and mother of two young children. In 2017, I made the difficult decision to transition out of academia. I was pregnant with my second child, and, after the struggles I…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today I was on a Zoom call with someone who only half-jokingly referred to the periodical Teen Vogue as the country’s leading socialist publication. While the magazine still focuses on “fashion, beauty, and entertainment news for teens,” its coverage of politics–and of higher education–has been remarkable. Take, for example, this piece published…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY For G. K. Professors are anxious and burned out. They’ve been pivoting. They’ve been juggling work and child care. They’ve been worried—about Covid-19, the economy, social justice, the nation’s divisive political climate. —The Chronicle of Higher Education In all of my time as a campus administrator—granted it’s only been three weeks since…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College and the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021). John K. Wilson interviewed Baldwin via…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The following is a call to action shared by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) Organizing Collective regarding the censorship by Zoom and Facebook of an online event at San Francisco State University. Read a previous blog post about it by John Wilson and others…
BY NAN ENSTAD Nearly every day there is bad news about draconian cuts to a college or a university system as the economic emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds decades of crisis in higher education in the United States. We can expect such cuts to continue and worsen unless we change course in how…
BY JOHN MCNAY One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get our college and university administrators to put education first and not allow the resources of the institutions to get hijacked for other purposes. The inability to focus on the real problems is widespread and yet the…