unCommon News February 2014

unCommon News A crowd-powered newsletter for a writing-centered community February, 2014 Dear Friends, We hope all’s well with you and your classes. This month we are delighted to announce the winner of the Aaron Swartz Award for 2013: Congratulations, Andrea Scott, Assistant Professor at Pitzer College, whose article “Formulating a Thesis” was published in April 2013. We are honored to…

California AB 2705: A Small Step Toward Equity

The following statement was released today by the Steering Committee of AAUP’s California Conference: The California Conference of the American Association of University Professors (CA-AAUP) endorses Assembly Bill 2705. The bill changes terms used by the California Education Code to describe the hard-working professional educators who now teach the majority of our community college students.…

The Miracle That Isn't

In my ongoing series “Right to Work, by the Numbers,” I have been trying to build the case that the “right to work” states are hardly the workers’ paradise that the Far Right portrays them to be. Instead, there is a none-too-subtle rhetorical sleight-of-hand at work here: the pro-labor states are derided as derided as…

Arts Education: Saying the Right Things Is a Start, but Then Undercutting What You Appear to Be Promoting Is Either Ineptitude or Hypocrisy

A very recent post on the Department of Education blog Homeroom promotes “Arts in the Schools Month.” Written by Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Office of Innovation and Improvement, the post begins: “The arts are an important part of a well-rounded education for all students. Arts-rich schools, those with high-quality arts programs and…

Is Education Like a Cell Phone? A Call to Action

By Dean Murakami, President, Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) The following remarks were delivered at the opening general session of the FACCC Advocacy and Policy Conference in Sacramento, California on March 2, 2014.  California is finally coming out of the horrible recession where our state legislators cut the funding for community colleges…

FACCC: Changing the Narrative

On March 2-3, the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) held its annual advocacy and policy conference in Sacramento around the theme of “Changing the Narrative on California Community Colleges.”  The conference included a full day and morning of discussions and panels and an afternoon of direct lobbying of legislators.  The opening session…

As Sydney Brenner Says…

Two years ago, I delivered a paper at the Modern Language Society annual meeting on blind peer review. I don’t much care for it, I said. Though I am uncomfortable with peer review as a whole, it was the “blind” part I was addressing particularly. Perhaps I was too timid. Perhaps it takes a Nobel…

On Shooting Oneself in the Foot

American educational institutions are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot. Not only are we often abusing students financially (see my earlier post referring to Suzanne Mettler’s work), but we are allowing corporate ideas (ones that are demolishing the stability of the American economy by squeezing the American workforce–as Barbara Garson, among others,…

Underwater Education

Suzanne Mettler’s The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy was quite useful to me when writing The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. She’s onto something, arguing (to quote from my book) that the: startling unwillingness to recognize the support we have received over our lives has had the surprising…