The ongoing media concentration on cases of domestic abuse perpetrated by NFL players against their spouses and children has, for the moment, pushed the issue of sexual assaults on our college campuses largely to the margins of our national attention. Our ability to solve problems seems to be diminishing in proportion to the ability—or willingness–of…
Here we go again. And there’s more. Corinthian Colleges, after having dashed any academic hopes of its students, is now also accused of predatory lending. That the wake and fiasco continue should come as no surprise, as online education continues to be the equivalent of fast food in many instances–too convenient and advertised with the…
On January 23, 2014, Christopher G. Kennedy was reelected by his peers as chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. In the public relations announcement it praised his putative transformation of the board into an ethical model of leadership: “During his five years as chairman, the board has restored confidence in the…
I have recently posted an item on the controversy generated by the Department of Defense’s when it made available to its employees with Appalachian backgrounds a course on how to talk less obviously like hillbillies [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/31/do-you-speak-hillbilly-and-wish-that-you-didnt/]. And, even more recently, I have posted an item on the ways in which armed conflicts often involve battles…
The influence of outside money on education has always been strong–and fighting it is one of the reasons the AAUP came into existence. Rarely, though, do we educators have real power over the source of that money. In the case of Pearson, however, we can have just that. The company makes a good deal of…
Writing for the Boston Globe, Oliver Ortega has reported on the Lynn, Massachusetts, school district’s decision to sever ties with Gordon College, a Christian institution that has placed student teachers in the district’s classrooms for more than a decade. The tension between the college’s and the school district’s positions on the employment rights of gay,…
In late July, Kris Olds wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed’s Blog U: Global Higher Ed titled “Why No MOOCs on Gaza?” [The complete article is available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/why-no-moocs-gaza] Rightly recognizing that the MOOC format would be perfectly suited to providing succinct overviews of the conflicts in the world’s hotspots, Olds searched sites of…
If you want to engage your students in a thoughtful debate about public discourse in the age of Facebook and Twitter, you can of course use the ten or twelve excellent posts that John K. Wilson, Hank Reichman, Michael Berube, and others have made to this blog on the Steven Salaita case. If you would like…
