Colleen Lye and James Vernon, co-chairs of the Faculty Association at the University of California, Berkeley, have a fantastic piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on the threat posed to faculty intellectual property rights, academic freedom, and educational quality by university claims to copyright over faculty-created online course materials. “The Erosion of Faculty Rights”…
Our own Hank Reichman (click here to see a list of his posts) has contributed to a New York Times opinion section “Room for Debate” spread, “Tongue-Tied on Campus.” Not only is he an important contributor to this blog but Reichman is the AAUP’s first vice president and chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His most…
This weekend two studies on the compensation of university presidents appeared. The Chronicle of Higher Education released its annual report on “Executive Compensation at Public Colleges and Universities” and the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington D.C. think tank, released a report finding that student debt and low-wage contingent faculty labor are increasing faster at…
In response to news of the destruction of murals at Central CT State University, we have received dozens of letters from around the world. These messages speak to the value of our mural program and the incredible contribution that our students have made to this campus and the community beyond our walls. We should…
America’s colleges and universities define themselves partly by the company that they keep. As they seek to improve the quality of their institutions, most higher education officials look at some combination of inputs – including the number of applications, acceptances, and admissions – and outputs – persistence and graduation rates – to determine how much…
AAUP members should receive their print copies of the May/June issue of Academe over the next few days. In the meantime, they can read it online–as can anyone else (there’s no paywall around here). If you only know us through the blog, you may find the magazine worth your while. More in depth and carefully prepared,…
This item originally appeared at Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is being re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains that site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. _________________________ Most mutilated journals in the library of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, September 1982-May 1983: 1. Personnel Psychology 2.…
These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Teresa Watanabe for the Los Angeles Times; the title of the article is “College Administrators Learning to Be Sexual Misconduct Detectives”: “Butte College administrator Al Renville was never trained as a police investigator, but that’s close to the job he found himself in when two…
I remember how shocked I was upon finding out that some students were taking all of their classes online–while living in the dorms. Then I was dismayed, too, that the source I learned this absurd behavior from did not even try to pull a Captain Renault out of Casablanca and say, “I’m shocked, shocked to find…