Seldom have the shifting sands upon which college athletics are built been more apparent than today. For those of us who have an interest in college sports, including millions of loyal alumni, the choice of an athletic conference is roughly tantamount to “the company that you keep.” At innumerable colleges and universities, nothing stirs alumni…
Education Week and the Huffington Post both recently reported on The College Board’s 10th annual AP Report to the Nation. Both reports noted that that a vast majority of Advanced Placement Computer Science test-takers last year were white males. Of the more than 20,000 students to take the exam, 81 percent were male and 54…
Author’s Note: A version of this post was publish on Raging Chicken Press under the title, “Slow Train to Destruction of Public Higher Ed in PA?: Defund then Divide-and-Conquer,” on Saturday, Feb. 22. If the fall 2013 semester saw the term “retrenchment” – the elimination of faculty, programs, and jobs – become part of daily…
According to a recent article in University World News, Global Edition, “China has stepped up pressure on ethnic minority students and lecturers in the restive northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, insisting that students must pass a test of political views and declare their allegiance to the Chinese state in order to graduate.” Near the end…
In a previous post, “Louie Gohmert and Ted Nugent Proud to Be Ignoramuses” [https://academeblog.org/2013/08/07/louie-gohmert-and-ted-nugent-proud-to-be-ignoramuses/], I surveyed the ridiculously stupid pronouncements that have come out of their mouths. There was a Texas connection at that time because Nugent had attracted a crowd of admirers at a Texas gun show who seemed to be competing with him…
In his column “How to Get a Job at Google,” Thomas Friedman talks about the views of Lazlo Bock, Google’s head of hiring. Those views explode the assumptions about education behind the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that are being imposed on American schools and that will continue to change (if fully implemented) what college…
South Carolina lawmakers have reduced the allocations to the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate because the lawmakers object to the inclusion of several “gay-themed” books in the institutions’ common required readings for their first-year students. The College of Charleston was docked $52,000, the amount spent on copies of Fun Home,…
February 18, 2014 At the 2013 convention in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its historical commitment to increasing access to post-secondary education and alleviating the financial burden that now too often is part of that education. Accordingly, we call on federal and state policymakers to make post-secondary training and education more accessible by ending the…
I present the article that follows this introduction, which is taken from the newsletter of the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron, because what is occurring there now is certainly occurring elsewhere and would seem to be of considerable broader interest. The political endorsements of increasing enrollments in STEM programs and the resulting allocation…
Readers of this blog who know Cat Warren from her work as editor of Academe from 2010 to 2012 probably don’t know that, when she wasn’t teaching classes at North Carolina State University or editing the magazine, she could often be found looking for bodies in the North Carolina woods. Solo, Cat’s German shepherd, had…