In academia, as elsewhere, there are all sorts of ostensibly significant distinctions between past achievements, current projects, and planning. The ubiquity of the planning is probably more than just as administrative obsession, more than just a salient illustration of the corporate influence on higher education. For one would be hard-pressed to find another arena of…
It Might Be Coincidental to Your Hatred of Him That He Is Black. But All of the Following Expressions of Hatred of Him Are Clearly Racist—and If You Don’t Think So, You Are Either a Racist or the Word “Racist” Has Lost All Meaning The recent controversy surrounding the caricaturing of President Obama by a…
The following letter to the editor appeared in the Columbus Dispatch in response to an article that placed some of the blame for increases in tuition and in student debt on inflated faculty salaries and continuing salary increases. ______________ Sunday, August 4, 2013 As president of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University…
This letter is a statement by the business community to articulate its broad support of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) [www.nextgenscience.org]. Such endorsements are essential in convincing legislators that science standards cannot be held hostage to extremist groups who have an antipathy toward science that is almost medieval—whose mistrust of science is rooted in…
At this time of the summer, when members of Congress return to their districts for town hall meetings often dominated by very vocal and very belligerent “Tea Party” activists, it is refreshing to see education officials in a conservative state resist pressures to make scientific standards conform to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Last week, the Kentucky…
This article was originally posted on Raging Chicken Press. I will be posting a series of articles about the incoming chancellor, Frank Brogan, in the upcoming weeks. Last week the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) Board of Governors chose Frank Brogan to become the next Chancellor of the 14 public university system. Brogan…
One of the favorite rhetorical devices of those on the Far Right is to take a charge leveled against them by progressives, to co-opt the language used to articulate that charge, and then to reframe the debate with the co-opted language so that it seems that the logic of their position is not just credible…
Today the U.S. Department of Education released a letter to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the agency that revoked accreditation for San Francisco City College. The letter came in response to a complaint filed by the California Federation of Teachers. The short version: ACCJC now has a year to “take immediate…
Cultural Representations of Higher Ed, No. 8 I am working backwards through this list. Here are films 1 to 50. The rankings are my own and in most cases somewhat arbitrary. The descriptions of the films are paraphrases of summaries found in a half-dozen print and online film guides. I compiled the list about a…
Certainly since Lyndon Johnson pushed through the social safety-net programs known collectively as the Great Society, but even since FDR began to create the first of those safety-net programs as part of his New Deal, the Far Right has been arguing vehemently that such programs are tantamount to communism, that they represent an unethical and…