Education, Inc., is a forthcoming documentary film about how money and politics are changing our schools. It will premiere on Friday, August 14, 2015. Here is the promotional description from the website for the documentary: “American public education is in controversy. As public schools across the country struggle for funding, complicated by the impact of…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
Some time ago, the authors of several posts to this blog, including me, took issue with several reports that asserted either that a very large percentage of adjunct faculty are quite satisfied with the conditions of their employment or, at the opposite extreme, that the main cause of their economic exploitation has been their own…
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force,” Eric Johnson writes: This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force. Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload…
This is a post by Rudy Fichtenbaum, President of the AAUP. _______________ The Chronicle of Higher Education just had an article about performance based funding in Florida. Performance based funding has been adopted in 30 states in one form or another and provides funding to universities and colleges if they meet certain metrics. Performance based…
In a recent article for the Washington Post, Lisa Rein has reported the following troubling details about the way in which VA hospitals have been purchasing prosthetics for veterans: “Employees in the purchasing department of a VA hospital in the Bronx had used government purchase cards like credit cards at least 2,000 times to buy prosthetic…
By 1970, almost everyone who had worked to create “programmed instruction” during the 1950s and 1960s had moved away from the idea of teaching machines as the centerpiece of education. These tools, they had realized, were only widely effective when in the hands of master craftspeople—that is, trained teachers who understood both the limits and…
President Timothy Killeen is completing his first month as leader of the University of Illinois system. In remarks before the Urbana-Champaign faculty Senate Executive Committee, he was rather cavalier about the AAUP censure vote last Saturday. Unlike Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, who stated in a conciliatory tone that removal of censure was important, President Killeen, according to…
Almost a year ago, the following brief item, written by Daniel Wilco, appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Two men have been indicted on charges they defrauded Delta and Northwest Airlines of $22 million between 2004 and 2013. “Michael Yedor and Paul Anderson have been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and 96 counts of…
Dr Steven Salaita, denied academic freedom for his tweets on the Israeli operation in Gaza last year, has been the subject of a national conversation on free speech, academic freedom and academic due process. I was present during the vote and spoke on behalf of Illinois Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that responded…