One of the things the assessment gurus of corporate-style education don’t like is the idea of professors in complete control of the curriculum and pedagogy in their own classrooms. They want everyone “to be on the same page,” feeling that education has no value unless done in unison. This is the thinking behind most cries…
The Occupy Movement has been the first major grassroots progressive movement in the United States in decades. But, at its core, the appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been that it is politically unaffiliated, and that lack of structure, or, more precisely, that lack of structural purpose, has also been its undoing. Occupy…
I have been thinking a great deal about John Ziker and his coleagues’ detailed study of the work that we, as faculty members, do, and I think that their study supports, directly or at least conceptually, most of the following observations: 1. We work very hard—much harder than most people realize and, in most cases,…
Tonight, President Obama will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the sixth time during his presidency. Below are links to the transcripts of his remarks at the first five dinners. I think that they are of interest for several reasons. First, he does this sort of thing better than any president—if not in history,…
Henry Giroux, in his new Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, credits the phrase of the title here to sixties radicals. I don’t remember it myself, but it certainly fits the time. College students were feeling empowered even as they were under attack; colleges and universities were places for change, for innovation, and the students felt…
My original post on this singular and provocative study of faculty work is available at: https://academeblog.org/2014/04/29/what-we-do-with-our-time/ I would like to thank the authors again for their work on the study [reported in The Blue Review at: https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/] and for then agreeing to answer my follow-up questions. Katie Demps, Matt Genuchi, David Nolin, and John Ziker collectively…
I have read some blistering commentaries on Sarah Palin’s obtuseness to her own stupidity and to the bottom-feeding political impulses that drive those to whom she seems to have the most enduring appeal. But, even given the savageness with which she has often been criticized and characterized, the following critique still manages to stand out:…
In his new book, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux writes that, “as public intellectuals, academics can do more.” We know that, of course, but it never hurts to hear it again, especially as the crisis in American education–and, following necessarily, in American society–grows. But what does it mean to be a public intellectual? What, in other…
John Ziker, chairman of the Anthropology Department at Boise State University, typically conducts field research in the Taimyr Autonomous Region of north-central Siberia, studying the Ust’-Avam, where people depend on hunting, fishing, and gathering for the majority of their food. But he and his colleagues Katherine Demps, David Nolin, and Matt Genuchi, have now turned their…
At The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Presidents Institute this past January, the theme was Leading Wisely: Linking Tradition and Innovation. The conference “explored ways presidents can tackle today’s unprecedented leadership challenges with a mix of time-tested solutions and new approaches.” CIC’s focus on ways for leadership at small and mid-size liberal arts colleges to…