This is the opening of an article written by Karen Farkas for Celevland.com: “AKRON, Ohio – A $556.40 olive jar in University of Akron President Scott Scarborough’s bedroom has become the flashpoint for those upset at the cost of renovations to the president’s home at a time when 161 employees lost their jobs. The jar, listed among…
This will be the first in a series of posts taken from the blog of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron [http://akronaaup.org/blog/]. That blog provides a chronicle of the changes that have been occurring with often startling rapidity at the university in the wake of a change in institutional leadership. This sort of…
Between 6:00 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. this morning, the Discovery Channel aired the following three 30-minute infomercials:Sexy in Three Weeks!; The Graduate: Learn about Innovative Grad and Undergrad Degrees; and No More Wrinkles! The middle of those three infomercials has been produced by Tribune Media for Western Governors University. One alternative to conventional, on-site delivery…
In a post to this blog that I made on June 18, “Why Selecting a College Major Primarily Because of the Employment Outlook in That Field Is a Terrible Idea” [https://academeblog.org/2015/06/18/why-selecting-a-college-major-primarily-because-of-the-employment-outlook-in-that-field-is-a-terrible-idea/], I focused on some of the salient points made in an interview by Peter Cappelli, a Professor of Management at the Wharton School at…
George Siemens first gained prominence in 2008 when he helped invent the massive, open, online course, better known by its acronym, the MOOC. MOOCs quickly evolved into something rather different from what Siemens had imagined, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing to head up the Gates-funded MOOC Research Initiative, which seeks to bring hard…
This post is being written as much in response to chhanks’ comment on Hank Reichman’s post, excerpting Vincent J. Roscingo’s article in Counterpunch, as to the post itself. In the comment, chhanks asks: “Can anyone at the AAUP tells what percentage of current university and college administrators were tenured faculty members before becoming administrators?” With…
Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
On July 30, Cathy O’Neil posted an article titled “The Manufactured Trucker Shortage” on her mathbabe blog. She opens the article with a quotation from an article in the Wall Street Journal that raises some alarm over the current shortage of long-distance trucker drivers, estimated to be about 30,000 drivers, and, worse, the projected shortage…
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…
As Maria indicates in her comment, the first half or so of this post is my own commentary. The material below the line is the item from the Department of Labor. I apologize for any confusion. One can argue that adjunct faculty whose primary employment is outside the college or university at which they are…