Guest poster Michael McDevitt is professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. He conducts research in political communication and is working on a book, Where Ideas Go to Die: Anti-Intellectualism in American Journalism. His e-mail address is mike.mcdevitt@colorado.edu. The killing of a school is never pleasant—especially when it’s your school—but a…
Yesterday, I was in Dayton, Ohio, meeting with several leaders of the Ohio Student Association (OSA). The Ohio Conference (OCAAUP) and our chapter at Wright State University have been supporting the group very enthusiastically. The OSA formed during the We Are Ohio campaign to repeal Senate Bill 5 as a mechanism for reaching voters 18-30.…
Guest blogger Alisa Roost is assistant professor of the humanities at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. Her e-mail address is aroost@hostos.cuny.edu. Here, Roost writes about “Supporting Veterans in the Classroom,” an article that appeared recently in Academe. The United States has benefited from an all-volunteer military with both more professionalism in the armed…
Wow. Thank you all. Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you. “Dr. Obama”–I like that. (Laughter.) I think I’ll have everybody at home start calling me that. (Laughter.) Thank you. I am so honored to help you celebrate this wonderful day. And thank you, Ally; thank you, Dr. Knapp, for your generous introduction. I also…
Money, the goal of all goals, today is ruining both education and government. When money becomes, as it has, our only measure of value, structures protecting anything else melt before it. As the “business model” is most keenly attuned to profit, it has become the one model for all of our endeavors. In my first “real” job out…
In the mid-1990s, a group of chief financial officers from Boston-area colleges joined together to form the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, or TBC for short. It quickly grew beyond the financial realm as local schools realized the gains that could be made from working together on common problems. In the new issue of Academe,…
Seizing a Sculpture “At Canada’s Capilano University, the administration confiscates a professor’s work caricaturing the president on the grounds that it constitutes ‘harassment.’” –INSIDE HIGHER ED I must say the Poodle is looking very presidential. The extended touch of gray shows someone who has had his share of worries, and the sharp, long tooth making…
Dear Students and Fellow Artists, Recently, nine of your murals at Central CT State University were ordered destroyed by CCSU President Jack Miller. Nine more are on the immediate chopping block. Miller and Chief Administrative Officer Richard Bachoo waited until classes had ended for the semester – then, without informing the artists, faculty or the…
The rise of online courses—massive and open or just regularly-sized—is one of the major trends in higher education over the last few years. Of course, the rapidly growing access to high speed Internet has been crucial in helping online education spread, but as Julie Vargas explains in the new issue of Academe, today’s online courses…
Ulf Kirchdorfer’s post yesterday made me laugh out loud. But, as funny as his observations about persistently dismal writing are, that sort of writing itself is just terribly disheartening, especially when one is confronted with document after document that seem to suggest that it has become something close to pervasive. If I have a choice…