Janet Napolitano, the President of the University of California system recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which she argued that, despite the challenges created by unprecedented cuts in state support for public higher education, it is a gross exaggeration to assert that American higher education is in crisis. Scott H. Levine,…
This is a carefully prepared, persuasive, and at times eloquent speech. It would have been nice if such speeches had been given more consistently at the beginning of the Obama presidency, instead of at the tail end of it, and if they had reflected a broader and louder political focus on protecting and promoting labor rights.…
Rudy Fichtenbaum has sent me the following statistical analysis in response to the assertions made by Campos in the article in the New York Times and as a follow-up to my own post on that article. I don’t think that anything that Rudy points out in this analysis substantially contradicts anything that I have asserted…
In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, Paul F. Campos has offered his opinion on “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much.” [The whole piece is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0] Campos argues that attributing the rise in tuition costs to reductions in state funding is a fairy tale that administrators have been…
A colleague sent me a link to the following post at Fighting against Casualisation in Education, a UK site promoting activism among contingent faculty. The actual post appears to be taken largely from the site of the University of Warwick. I am assuming that most of you, like me, will have little or no familiarity…
The following item, which appeared in the Ohio Conference’s weekly communications to our members, highlights the value of getting “our” message out and not relying on our institutions and our administrations to be the only spokespersons on higher-ed-related legislation. By the way, in typing the title of this post, I just realized that we routinely…
The following letter was published in the Toledo Blade this past week. It was written in response to a seemingly well intentioned and fairly thoughtful op-ed on the increasing tuition and fees being paid students and their families, which unfortunately suggested that faculty compensation and the leverage provided by unionization were among the main culprits:…
Aaron Barlow’s post today concerns legislation proposed in North Carolina that will uniformly increase teaching loads at all public universities to four courses per semester. I might look at this kind of legislation somewhat differently if the Far Right was interested in funding public higher education at any reasonable level and some legislators were, in…
Tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita, last night, filed a response to the University of Illinois motion to dismiss his civil rights lawsuit against the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois officials and donors. The response lays out the underlying constitutional, contractual and tort-based claims at the heart of the lawsuit and addresses how the complaint alleges…