Ohio: Where Graduation Rates, Teaching Loads, and Administrative Bloat Have Become Part of the Debate about the State Budget

Testimony of John McNay, Ph.D., President Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors Before the House Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education Representative Cliff Rosenberger, Chair March 6, 2013 Chairman Rosenberger, Ranking Member Ramos, and distinguished members of the Higher Education Subcommittee:  my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio…

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…

Duke’s Composition MOOC & Writing Commons, First-Day Musings

Yesterday (3/18/13) at Writing Commons, the open-education home for writers, we had unprecedented interest in our project: 7,071 unique visitors came to our site! What caused our readership to more than double in a day? Professor Denise Comer’s team from Duke University launched its ground-breaking Composition MOOC, English Composition I: Achieving Expertise.  In case you missed the…

3/18/13 is a pretty huge day @ Writing Commons thanks to the Duke MOOC!

In past blogs, I’ve chronicled the development of Writing Commons, the Open Education Home for Writers, with hopes that my experiences developing an Open Education Resource (OER) might be of interest to faculty across the disciplines.  I’ve argued that faculty might want to consider contributing to Writing Commons or other OERs that are peer-reviewed, that…

Disability in the Academy (an ongoing dialogue)

Francis Bacon wrote that people with disability develop to be “extreme bold” as a habit born of their need to defend themselves from the “scorn” of others. No doubt much has changed in the years since Bacon opined on the matter, but Stephen Kuusisto writes, in “Extreme Bold in the Faculty Ranks,” that students and…

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…

Contrary to Arguments by Hardcore Open Education Advocates, Creative Commons NC ND Is A Valid License for Academic Authors

Various talented folks and communities (e.g., the Open Knowledge Foundation and QuestionCopyright.org) believe Creative Commons should retire its NC ND clauses.  Students for Free Culture argue the NC clause is “completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work).”   Timothy Vollmer  asserts the NC ND clauses should be renamed ““Commercial Rights Reserved” because this license fails…