At the end of December, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Steve Herbert titled “Colleges Trim Staffing Bloat.” So, if you did not read any further than the title, you might think that all of the attention to administrative bloat as a cost-driver in American higher education was finally producing some results. Think…
“Standards” and “College readiness.” Belief in the efficacy of the former and in the possibility of using them to create the latter (and an urgency manufactured through meaningless comparisons between American schools and others throughout the world) lies behind the current rush to impose the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on American public schools. The…
In a recent op-ed piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Worldwide blog, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak responded to an article written by Nigel Thrift, vice chancellor of the University of Warwick. Thrift had argued for the creation of an international association of colleges and universities, suggesting that it would not only facilitate efforts to meet…
For the past five to six months, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been confronting a seemingly ever-increasing number of legislative and legal investigations into misconduct by his immediate subordinates, starting with the politically motivated decision to close lanes leading onto the George Washington Bridge but expanding into seeming improprieties in how federal funds allocated…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org. _______________ In November, the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and Workforce launched an electronic forum to gather comments from contingent faculty members about their working conditions and the effect of those working conditions on students. The recently-released…
I have looked carefully at the backgrounds of the President’s two most recent nominees for upper-level positions related to higher education within the Department of Education. I have absolutely no personal animus against either of these nominees. In fact, they seem like well-intentioned individuals with a strong commitment to public service. But their backgrounds are…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ In a recent article, Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University, pinpointed several misconceptions about higher education that are driving our national discussion and policy. He tackles, for instance, the almost exclusive emphasis on college as an agent of…
Dissident Voice describes itself as “a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and justice.” It presents a perspective that most readers would describe as Far Left. Although I am generally not put off by the articles that appear in it, some of them are written from points of view that are considerably more radical…
This is a guest post by Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history emerita at Yeshiva University. She also is a former editor of Academe and served on the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Her article, “One Historian’s Perspective on Academic Freedom and the AAUP,” is in the January-February issue of Academe. Since I no longer edit…
This is a guest post by Rebecca Gould, a professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Her article, “Aaron Swartz’s Legacy.” appears in the January-February issue of Academe. Aaron Swartz is gone but his legacy lives on. In my article for the current issue of Academe, I offered a few reasons why his brief life, including…