The following item is another one from Futility Closet (http://www.futilitycloset.com/). It is re-posted here with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates delivered to your e-mail each morning. ************************* When PLAFSEP magazine asked its readers to nominate the silliest library subject heading, the hands-down winner was “Buttocks (In…
Recently, the administration of the City University of New York proposed a series of academic changes to the school, grouping these changes together under the name “Pathways.” The system would make it easier for students to transfer between CUNY schools, and it would have looser graduation requirements. This proposal and the faculty opposition to it…
Despite the evolving interpretation offered by state and federal courts, American higher education as a community remains committed in its support to increase diversity among students. At the same time, however, our colleges and universities largely fail to link diversity initiatives to specific workforce needs. This tendency often applies philosophically to all students enrolled, fueled…
Barbara Bowen, President of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York (CUNY), sent this message to union members yesterday: Dear Colleague: The results of the referendum of No Confidence in Pathways are in: 92% voted No Confidence in Pathways. The vote is a stunning rebuke to the Pathways…
On May 23, the Century Foundation Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal released an important new study describing how best to strengthen community colleges to achieve socioeconomic mobility for more Americans. Led by co-chairs Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library and former president of Amherst College,…
Guns on Campus, Discouraging News, Addendum 1 The cable news networks, like the newspapers long before them, have turned “tabloid” coverage of crimes and trials into a staple element of their programming. It may have started with the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, but, if the recent ratings for the coverage of the Jodi…
In an earlier post, “A Rhetoric of Demonization and Exclusion” [https://academeblog.org/2013/05/23/a-rhetoric-of-demonization-and-exclusion/], I discussed the lunatic-fringe rhetoric of the GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Bishop D.W. Jackson. That post included a re-post of a post to Right-Wing Watch, which drew on public pronouncements by Jackson that have been reported in the print media or…
It startles me each time I hear another person (usually, but not always, a non-educator) adamantly claim that education can successfully follow the same patterns of automation as industry or that it can be structured identically to business. This is nonsense. To be blunt (and has been pointed out for years–to unresponsive ears), it arises…
Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman whose unfortunate last name made his digital sharing of suggestive photos of himself seem at least as ridiculous as it was tawdry, has entered the Democratic primary to be elected mayor of New York. Immediately, he has moved into second place in the polls, though with just fifteen…