Writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution [1 Jan. 2016: A,1], Chris Joyner and Aaron Gould Sheinin have reported on the unusual aspects of how Georgia universities lobby state legislators. Their article, “AJC at the Gold Dome: University Lobbyists Spend Big on State Lawmakers,” details not only the practices of the lobbyists but the reasons why those…
Writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution [31 Dec. 2015: A,1], Nedra Rhone reports on the rise in organized student activism nationwide but especially in greater Atlanta. In the article “Today’s Student Activists: On Fire against a Gumbo of Issues,” she emphasizes that this new wave of student activism is targeting more than racism, addressing issues “from…
This past week, there was a protest at Eastern Michigan University against the continuation of the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) that Governor Snyder’s administration created ostensibly to “save” Detroit’s “failing” public school system. The EAA has promoted charter schools at the expense of the already under-funded public schools, while producing no improvement in the educations…
When Honored Leaders Held and Even Promoted Some of the Least Honorable Attitudes of Their Times The Atlantic has published a series of articles and facilitated several forums addressing the controversy, centered at Princeton University, over President Woodrow Wilson’s attitudes toward race. In “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” Dick Lehr provides an account…
As if anyone needed further proof that Arne Duncan could not care less about students, consider his logic on the settlement reached with Education Management, the for-profit college corporation. What follows is taken from a Huffington Post article by Shahien Nasiripour: “A trio of Senate Democrats on Monday sharply rebuked outgoing Education Secretary Arne Duncan…
The pecking order: those who teach the most students are not part of the academic elite. The pecking order: those with the fewest students are the privileged, proud elite. Those who teach the most classes are paid less than those who think about teaching. The reason for the increase in academic-fiscal mismanagement is the rise of…
Barbara J. Wilson became interim chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when Phyllis Wise resigned under pressure in the wake of revelations of a private e-mail account to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. She continues to also serve as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In the wake of the…
This post will be the first in a series treating the decision of the administration of Adams State University to ban Danny Ledonne, a former adjunct faculty member, from the campus– under threat of immediate arrest should he violate the ban. In this post, I will provide an outline of the events that led to…
In a piece published last week by Huffington Post, Laurie Jones and Wanda Evans-Brewer ask and answer that rhetorical question in promoting a new short film called Professors in Poverty. The last three paragraphs of the article are particularly strong: “The sub-contractor business model is becoming increasingly popular in our “shared economy” society. But is…
Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…