So many stupid things are written about higher education that it’s refreshing when one man’s idiocy on the topic rises to new heights. I bring you Rick Karlgaard in Forbes: “In May 2014 several American universities and colleges appeared on the verge of French-like suicide. Student hissy fits at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers and Smith caused…
Although the more overtly political spending of the Koch brothers has received much more attention, the Walton Family Foundation has, not surprisingly, been one of the major supporters of right-wing think tanks and public-policy experiments. Long a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the…
This “book” seems very analogous to the sections of the WalMart and McDonald’s websites that are devoted to “career opportunities” with those companies–as if any significant number of those in the corporate management have worked their way up from stocking shelves, working the cash registers, or putting together sandwiches. Of course, adjunct faculty have invested so…
John Dewey starts off Experience and Education (1938) with this: MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Or, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are…
That’s how Jamienne Studley, Deputy Under Secretary at the Education Department, regards the Obama administration’s proposed system of ranking colleges. “This is not so hard to get your mind around.” Actually, it is. All blenders have a single purpose. They take certain types of organic material and combine them into products of chosen consistency. They can be judged…
One of the major sources of education funding in Missouri is the revenues produced by the state lottery and from riverboat gambling, both of which have been down this year. The state provides 36.76% of the funding for K-12 education, and 16.6% of that funding comes from the lottery and gaming. I could not find…
In January, British porn producer Johnny Rockard released a film that was largely shot on the Frenchay Campus of the University of the West of England in Bristol. The film focuses on Rockard’s supposed search for a new porn star, a search that ends when he finds a “psychology major,” played by established porn actress…
Guest poster Michael McDevitt is professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. He conducts research in political communication and is working on a book, Where Ideas Go to Die: Anti-Intellectualism in American Journalism. His e-mail address is mike.mcdevitt@colorado.edu. The killing of a school is never pleasant—especially when it’s your school—but a…
Money, the goal of all goals, today is ruining both education and government. When money becomes, as it has, our only measure of value, structures protecting anything else melt before it. As the “business model” is most keenly attuned to profit, it has become the one model for all of our endeavors. In my first “real” job out…