When I was entering graduate school in 1978, there were 29 new Ph.D.’s for every tenure-track job opening in English. It was the period in which anecdotes about Ph.D.’s driving taxi cabs became commonplace. I didn’t know that information at the time, but it became very apparent as I made my way through the Masters…
Writing for the Associated Press, Hope Yen reported recently that the earnings gap between young adults with and without bachelor’s degrees has stretched to its widest level in nearly half a century. She suggested that it is a sign of the growing value of a college education despite rising tuition costs. Citing Pew Research Center…
The latest book from Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, Big Bang Disruption, published in January by Portfolio/Penguin, outlines how the risks associated with Clayton Christensen’s theory on disruptive innovation have intensified due to the effects of the internet and rapid technological change. Instead of established industries having years to respond, or at least trying to…
If American higher education is going to continue to aspire to excellence, its institutions need to address and reverse the growing reliance on adjuncts as teachers. Not only is this exploitative of the adjuncts (to say nothing of the students), but it reduces our colleges and universities to factories, effectively excluding academic freedom and removing…
In 2012, the National Science Foundation conducted a public survey on basic knowledge of science, but the results were just released. The survey tracked the answers provided by 2,200 randomly selected adults to ten true-or false questions. The item that has attracted the most media attention has been the stunning revelation that 26% of the…
Today, in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof presents a column headlined “Professors, We Need You!” He wonders what has happened to those of us in academia, ending with these words: I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves…
At the end of December, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Steve Herbert titled “Colleges Trim Staffing Bloat.” So, if you did not read any further than the title, you might think that all of the attention to administrative bloat as a cost-driver in American higher education was finally producing some results. Think…
“Standards” and “College readiness.” Belief in the efficacy of the former and in the possibility of using them to create the latter (and an urgency manufactured through meaningless comparisons between American schools and others throughout the world) lies behind the current rush to impose the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on American public schools. The…
I’ve enjoyed this video in support of legislation for equal compensation for all faculty in Colorado’s community colleges and asked colleague Don Eron to write about it. Don is a faculty member at UC Boulder, a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and a leader in the Colorado AAUP conference.…
Though she is perhaps best known for her 1966 skewering of LBJ, MacBird, perhaps all of us should be paying a little more attention to Barbara Garson today. Her book Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live should be out in paperback any day now. Here’s what Adam Hochschild says about it: Garson knows that the hard…