On Thursday, the Iowa Board of Regents unanimously appointed former IBM senior vice president J. Bruce Harreld as the University of Iowa’s next president. Harreld’s experience in higher education is limited to a few years as an adjunct business teacher, but the regents apparently selected him over three distinguished academic leaders for his alleged expertise…
By Stephen Kuusisto When Iowa’s Board of Regents selected J. Bruce Herreld, a businessman with no prior experience in education, as the new president of the University of Iowa they affirmed three principles: the university is now strictly a business, the faculty and students are to be put in their respective places, and those places…
Academic publishing has gone topsy-turvy over the past couple of decades, leaving those responsible for hiring, retention, tenure and promotion often scratching their heads. There’s so much money, now, in even small print runs (if the publisher is appropriately situated) that 300 hardbound copies sold at 100 dollars each to libraries can create profits–especially if…
September 1, 2015: When we released our letter on August 27, 2015 we had 125 signers. Despite the intimidation and harassment we have received at this blog site and elsewhere, more faculty have written to us asking that their names be included in the list of signatories–we now number 135. We are heartened by our…
A new report from the Association for Public and Land-Grant Universities is titled Land-Grant but Unequal. Focusing on the funding for the HBCUs covered under the Second Morrill Act of 1890, the report offers the following conclusions: “From 2010-2012, 61 percent of 1890 land-grant institutions did not receive 100 percent of the one-to-one-matching funds from…
Here is the weekly newsletter from Education Dive, which focuses largely on digital innovations in higher education: The first article somewhat blithely acknowledges that “instructor availability” is one of the major concerns of students enrolled in MOOCs, as if it is a problem that can be resolved with more “innovation,” rather than one of the…
The following map was included in an article by Libby Nelson, published by Vox. The map originally appeared in an article by Sandhya Kambhampati and Meredith Myers in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It shows how long it would take a student working half-time at a minimum wage job to earn enough to cover one…
Phil Magness keeps attributing the growth in the percentage of part-time faculty to the rise of the for-profit universities. But his own chart seems to show that that impact has been less than one might expect. Notice that the percentage of part-time faculty at all institutions is 47%, only .4% higher than the total for…
Another element of the broader issues addressed in Aaron’s post is the disparity in the nature of adjuncting–of teaching part-time–in different disciplines and in covering different levels of courses. The adjunct faculty in professional schools very likely have full-time employment outside of the university. The same is true for the great majority of adjunct faculty…
Forbes September 7, 2015 issue will contain an article “Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling Art Degrees and False Hopes” by Katia Savchuk. It’s about the for-profit Academy of Art University, another of such colleges that expanded greatly over the last couple of decades. Since 1992, its “enrollment has skyrocketed from 2,200 to 16,000,…