By Dean Murakami, President, Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) The following remarks were delivered at the opening general session of the FACCC Advocacy and Policy Conference in Sacramento, California on March 2, 2014. California is finally coming out of the horrible recession where our state legislators cut the funding for community colleges…
More than 120 scientific papers have been removed from electronic databases of such papers published by Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. The papers contain fraudulent research findings—but not exactly of the kind that you might expect. Apparently, the papers were generated using a program called SCIgen, or some knock-off. Developed by…
This post is, in some ways, a follow-up to Walter Breau’s post on the low numbers of students of color taking AP exams in computer science and other STEM subjects, as well as Aaron Barlow’s recent posts on the Common Core standards. Our K-12 schools, both public and private, have become increasingly bifurcated in terms…
February 18, 2014 At the 2013 convention in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its historical commitment to increasing access to post-secondary education and alleviating the financial burden that now too often is part of that education. Accordingly, we call on federal and state policymakers to make post-secondary training and education more accessible by ending the…
I present the article that follows this introduction, which is taken from the newsletter of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron, because what is occurring there now is certainly occurring elsewhere and would seem to be of considerable broader interest. The political endorsements of increasing enrollments in STEM programs and the resulting allocation…
This series will review the employment data for U.S. colleges and universities from 2004 to 2012. That data has been measured against enrollment, by the percentage increase in each category per 1,000 students at the institution. The five categories are: full-time faculty, part-time faculty, upper administration, professional staff, and non-professional staff (with the last three…
I have found Walter Breau’s post, “Big Bang Disruption,” to be extremely thought-provoking. That said, neither I nor anyone else should hold him in any way responsible for anything that follows in this post (or, for that matter, anything that has preceded this paragraph in this post). If one compares the life cycles of gadgets…
The title of this post is another one of those entrenched but hackneyed questions that obscures the real issues in higher education. The often-heard claim that federal mandates have necessitated the proliferation of administrators makes little sense on several levels. First, and most basically, why should keeping data, etc., on what are essentially secondary, if…
When I was entering graduate school in 1978, there were 29 new Ph.D.’s for every tenure-track job opening in English. It was the period in which anecdotes about Ph.D.’s driving taxi cabs became commonplace. I didn’t know that information at the time, but it became very apparent as I made my way through the Masters…
If American higher education is going to continue to aspire to excellence, its institutions need to address and reverse the growing reliance on adjuncts as teachers. Not only is this exploitative of the adjuncts (to say nothing of the students), but it reduces our colleges and universities to factories, effectively excluding academic freedom and removing…