Fiftieth Anniversary of Berkeley Free Speech Movement
This fall will mark a half-century since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the University of California, Berkeley campus. “After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history,” writes longtime Bay Area newspaper columnist Martin Snapp in the summer issue of California, Berkeley’s alumni magazine. The FSM began…
Putting the “Trust” Back in Trustee: The Role of the Trustee in College Governance
Last week, a group convened by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report examining the role of trustees in college and university governance. The report, titled “Governance for a New Era: A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees,” suggested the trustees should take a more active role by establishing definable institutional metrics, promoting…
California Reverses Ruling on Abortion Rights at Catholic Universities
In a major victory for faculty and staff and for reproductive rights more generally, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has reversed a previous decision to allow two Catholic universities to eliminate coverage of most abortions for employees, declaring that state law requires health insurance plans to cover all abortions. The state had previously…
National (In-)Security: Fifty Notable American Espionage Novels: 43-45.
Roth, Holly. The Content Assignment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. After a career as a fashion model, Holly Roth shifted to a writing career, contributing to newspapers and magazines and then working as an editor with periodicals ranging from Seventeen and Cosmopolitan to the American Journal of Surgery. His career as a novelist…
What Helps Students Learn?
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The push for doing education on the cheap has led to a number of “innovations” nearly always touted as ways to “do more with less.” But the data on these experiments increasingly present a more complicated picture of their…
Godwin's Law at Clemson
Godwin’s Law says that online arguments devolve into comparisons with Hitler or Nazis. We can extend that, I think, to almost any American argument involving politics and include “fascist” in the list of comparables: A student at Clemson University in South Carolina, in order to bring attention to the university’s past involvement in racism, has…
Usual Suspects Saying the Usual Things: Critiquing the Schmidt Report
This week the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-leaning group founded by Lynne Cheney (aka Darth Vader’s wife) released a report endorsed by a group of twenty-three trustees, administrators, and a handful of largely conservative faculty from elite institutions, headed by Benno Schmidt, former President of Yale University and Chair of the…
A Link to "The Trouble With Textbooks: A Great American Rip-Off"
The following is a link to an article I published about textbooks. I resolve to do something concrete about this problem, and one part of the solution will be abandoning the practice of using textbooks for certain courses. I hope others will follow and offer suggestions. I hope others may already be teaching without “required” textbooks. http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/22/the-trouble-with-textbooks-a-great-american-rip-off/
One Faculty, One Struggle
I don’t know anything about Lakeland Community College in Ohio, much less about the issues that may be provoking faculty there to go on strike (but I can guess they are similar to those faced by faculty everywhere). However, when I chanced across this inspiring post from this morning on the website of the Ohio…