Last night, at a church by Washington Square Park, Diane Ravitch spoke. She’s not the most long-term opponent of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and all the other “reform” battalions, but she is proving the best. She is becoming our champion, our Horatio defending Rome: Alone stood brave Horatius, But constant still…
I received the following e-mail yesterday afternoon: ________________________ Martin, last night the NRA successfully recalled two Colorado state senators who had voted to pass good gun safety laws. Democrats had more money and district demographics were in their favor. But the election came down to turnout and Republicans had more intensity and more reliable voters. The biggest challenge facing…
In an article last week on School Board News Today entitled “The New College ‘Caste System’–and How We Might Change It,” Lawrence Hardy writes: At a Washington, D.C., forum this week called “2013 College Rankings and Higher Education’s New Caste System,” a Texas college president, journalists from the Washington Monthly and elsewhere, and a key Obama administration aide,…
On Monday, September 9, Ohio Conference AAUP President John McNay delivered testimony [full text provided below] to the Higher Education Reform Study Committee–a new standing committee started in the Ohio House of Representatives over the summer. The committee has embarked on a “road show,” traveling all over the state to public and for-profit colleges to discuss…
President Obama has set the higher education agenda for the remainder of his term by linking consumer fears with politics. There is substance in the president’s arguments about sticker price, the squeezing of the American middle class, and the failure to provide access to a higher education degree for those who seek it. The fundamental…
Writing for Business Insider, Cork Gaines has surveyed “All the Crazy College Football Uniforms for This Season” [http://www.businessinsider.com/new-college-football-uniforms-2013-8?op=1]. On its surface, the article seems a survey of an aspect of the sport that has become increasingly eccentric, almost a gimmicky trademark for some teams. Long the trendsetter in mutating and eye-popping uniforms, the University of…
A year ago, in the wake of the protests across the Muslim world ostensibly sparked by the Internet trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims, Aya Bratrawy and Rachel Zoll, writing for the Associated Press, collaborated on the article “An Overview about the Prophet Muhammad and Why He is So Revered by Muslims.” The writers…
Part 3: Reduce the Cost of a Degree by 40% by Reducing Labor and Capital Costs. [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an…
I teach courses in postcolonial literatures and cultures, and I like to think that I have moved largely beyond a self-referential and reductive perception of unfamiliar aspects of other cultures as exotic or bizarre. But then I come across a news item that leaves me wondering whether it is worth my time to wonder what…
Part 2: Deliver Half of a Baccalaureate Degree by MOOC [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series (): Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an earlier post, I pointed out,…