Colleagues and I who are more deskbound than individuals who teach P.E. have joked about, I mean entertained the thought of, teaching walk jog run classes. We should be able to do it, even if our advanced degrees are in accounting, biology, or English. A fact that many faculty do not know is that in…
The following media release was issued today by the Faculty Association for the California Community Colleges (FACCC). With members at all 112 California community colleges, FACC describes itself as “a statewide professional membership association that advocates solely for all California Community College faculty. Since 1953, FACCC has provided focused representation for the community college faculty…
The following piece by Christopher Newfield, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first appeared on the blog, “Remaking the University,” which he runs with UCLA Professor Michael Meranze. It is reposted by permission. Must innovation disrupt everything so that society might have new and better things? Widespread fatigue with this idea…
I often return to the quote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” by William Butler Yeats, which I first became aware of through his Irish countryman and fellow poet and Nobel Prize recipient, Seamus Heaney. I don’t take this utterance to mean that what we…
It should be crystal clear from my two previous posts (here and here) on the topic that not only do I oppose the recent California Superior Court decision in Vergara v. California, which overturned California statutes guaranteeing “teacher tenure” and layoff by seniority for the state’s K-12 teachers, I have also questioned its legal rationale. …
This is an acknowledgment from a doctoral dissertation in the University Microforms International database: If I had a dime for every time my wife threatened to divorce me during the past three years, I would be wealthy and not have to take a postdoctoral position which will only make me a little less poor and…
Recent news about a former provost who allegedly touched inappropriately, repeatedly inappropriately, colleagues, got me thinking about a serious and pervasive practice in higher education. This was after some initial sophomoric snickering and thoughts I am sure even the most “serious” academic would have after reading about this case. Letters of recommendation are written to assist…
A new study, The Innovative University: What College Presidents Think About Change in American Higher Education, sponsored by Blackboard and The Chronicle of Higher Education, has this to say about disruption: Well over half of all presidents believe that at least a moderate amount of disruption is needed in higher education. Years ago disruption to higher-education’s business model…
Three years ago, my newly appointed dean asked if I would take on responsibility for New York City College of Technology’s Associate degree in Liberal Arts and Arts with a primary focus on overseeing advisement. What I have learned about our students since then is astonishing–astonishing, that is, in the ignorance it highlights, in the…