One of the outgrowths of the reduction in tenure-track lines, the growing number of candidates for any academic job, and the willingness of college and university administrations to rely on adjunct workers to teach lower-level courses has been an increasing timidity on the part of those lucky enough to find themselves on the tenure track.…
This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] Although the details are shameful, it’s good to see the mainstream press publicizing the facts about higher education faculty appointments and compensation. A recent NBC report highlights these facts from the most recent annual survey…
The following piece is being re-posted from the Catholic Higher Education Advocate [http://cheausa.org/], which reprinted it from The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper. The Catholic Higher Education Advocate is currently including this op-ed as part of a broader feature story, “Battle Intensifies at Boston College over Shared Governance,” covering the public back and forth between the Boston…
The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…
Conversation is the coin of the realm in American higher education. Shared governance rests upon reasonable, open and transparent communication. Internal and external constituencies – including parents, alumni, donors, political leaders, and the media – embrace the motivations and actions that shape education, often more so depending upon who delivers the message. Curiously, conversation can…
Guest blogger Gaye Tuchman is Professor Emertia of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (2009) and Making News (1978). Not so long ago you could ask, “What’s black and white and read all over,” and everyone knew you were referring to a newspaper (well maybe a blushing zebra). …
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 6 Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham U P, 2008. In this seminal work of the corporatization of American universities, Frank Donoghue offers a much longer historical view than most other authors focusing…
The following e-mail is from World Net Daily, which represents a worldview somewhere quite to the right of National Review, American Spectator, and RedStates. It is worth the few minutes that it will take to read the e-mail to gain a clearer (if more mind-boggling) sense of what folks on that far-right edge of the…
Huffington Post recently ran a series of photographs of an abandoned farmhouse in which all of the previous occupants’ furniture and other belongings have been left to gather dust. Here are several of those photos: The rest of the photographs in this series can be found at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/abandoned-farmhouse_n_3163713.html These photographs reminded me of the haunting…