In a world increasingly dominated by social media, it is no longer possible for a college community to present what it values “in plain sight.” Prospective applicants and their families judge a college today largely by what they find on the web. In the old days, crafting an image was perhaps easier. Marketing was more…
Writing for Bankrate.com, Christina Crouch has surveyed in some detail “Three Radical Plans” for reducing college costs [http://www.bankrate.com/finance/college-finance/rethinking-college-costs-radical-plans.aspx]. The first two of these “three radical plans” have been addressed previously in posts to this blog: the “pay it forward” plan that originated in Oregon, that has been adopted or adapted in some form in 15…
When I read what Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald emailed his team recently, all I could think of was my father: “Understand that by voting to have a union, you would be transferring your trust from those you know — me, your coaches and the administrators here — to what you don’t know — a…
John Romano, writing in the Tampa Bay Times over the weekend, reviews the connection between Charles Koch and Florida State University, a problematic connection (and not the only one of its type) that has been under scrutiny for at least three years now: The relationship at FSU drew howls of protest in 2011 when a couple of professors…
This year, the National Security Agency (NSA) is celebrating its 60th year in existence. To commemorate the anniversary, the agency has produced a book that is in some places referred to simply as an “Anniversary Book” but in other places referred to as a “Memory Book,” which sounds a great deal more sentimental. The book…
In this past week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a very revealing graph representing the changes in employment in colleges and universities from 1976 to 2011. The graph is based on an analysis of IPEDs data by AAUP’s John Curtis. Full-Time Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty 1976 – 353,681 2011 –…
In February, an op-ed by Thomas Freidman in The New York Times summarized an interview with Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google, on how to get a job at Google. Bock is involved in about 100 hires at Google per week. With college graduations approaching, Freidman went back to Google…
In one of my posts yesterday, I reposted an item from Futility Closet. Titled “Taking Literary Minimalism to Its Endpoint” [https://academeblog.org/2014/04/19/6702/] it included this lead: “In 1965 poet Aram Saroyan wrote a poem consisting of a single word, lighght. George Plimpton included it in the American Literary Anthology, and Saroyan received a $500 cash award…