Mismanagement at the City Colleges of Chicago
The following is an open letter to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College. Dear Chairperson Wolff, members of the Board of Trustees, and Chancellor Hyman: When I spoke to you last November, my concern in my very brief remarks had to do exclusively with the issue of…
Review of Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities.
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3 Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012. This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of…
American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges.
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 2 Altbach, Philip G., Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl, eds. American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges. 3rd Edition. Eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2011. In selecting the essays included in this collection, the editors…
Remarks on Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education: No. 1 Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford U P, 2011. Ginsberg’s book has very quickly become a seminal work in the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to higher education’s…
A Follow-Up to “Taking Heed from the Front Lines”
The greatest irony in the increasing privatization of public education is that the deficiencies that the “reformers” typically claim to be trying to correct are often exacerbated by the very “reforms” that they are advocating. There is now a tremendous amount of statistical evidence that, on average, students in charter schools perform worse–and often much…
What If The Onion Sponsored an Essay Contest
A website called foreclosure.com is sponsoring an essay contest for current undergraduates in America’s colleges and universities. The contest was introduced in 2009. First prize is $5,000, and there are four runners-up prizes of $1,000. The students must write an 800- to 2,000-word essay on an assigned topic, and this year’s topic is the following:
Whom Do We Disgrace with Our Honors?
As the clock ticks closer (if clocks can, in fact, still be said to tick) to Lance Armstrong’s confessional interview with Oprah, it’s worth noting that as the Union Cycliste Internationale used the findings of the United State Anti-Doping Agency to strip Armstrong of all of his cycling titles, including his record seven Tour de…
Predictions for 2013
The movement toward presenting core curricula through MOOCs delivered by outside providers will continue unabated until some basic questions are answered. What is the maximum number of students who can take a MOOC before the scale becomes preposterous: 30,000–300,000–3,000,000? How do digital videos of classes avoid the pedagogical issues inherent to large lecture classes, issues…
College… Without a Safety Net
As a teacher at a college with a student population made up primarily of minorities, immigrants, and/or first-generation college students, an article in today’s New York Times hit home. By Jason DeParle, it is titled “For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall.” One of my greatest frustrations, and one I constantly work…