Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3 Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012. This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of…
As I mentioned in my last Academe blog post, we weren’t quite sure what to expect after Duke University adopted Writing Commons as its textbook for its MOOC, English Composition 1, Achieving Expertise. Always the optimist, I imagined 50,000 to 70,000 students all banging on the server door at the same time. Plus, I anticipated additional traffic…
Writer and teacher John Warner lists his thoughts on automated essay grading for InsideHigherEd. He comes up with 22. For me, the ones that stand out are these: 6. … Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task. Grading writing, while time consuming and occasionally unpleasant,…
Yesterday on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh read a Wall Street Journal article summarizing the National Association of Scholars (NAS) study about Bowdoin, and quoted the finding that Bowdoin doesn’t require history majors to take an American history class. Limbaugh declared: So a history major at Bowdoin College is taught about the intrinsic discrimination against…
This guest post is by Alvin Burstein, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Louisiana is the epicenter of an assault on the university as a community of scholars. The state has become notorious for eroding academic freedom and its foundation in shared governance and tenure. After the rough-shod procedures adopted by New…
I had lunch in Boston last week with Rob Hutter and Michael Staton, partners at Learn Capital, based near San Francisco. Both are extremely creative, committed and entrepreneurial thinkers about the intersection of ed tech and higher education. The conversation ranged widely as time flew by. What struck me most during it, however, was a…
“What we’re struggling with is a president who has a mission that doesn’t apparently involve active involvement in university life,” said Thomas Prusa, a professor of economics. “Maybe if the president was more tuned in, he would think that we have 58,000 students, 18 to 22 years old, and what exactly is happening? He is throwing…
Part 1: Population and Population Movement People who are pro-labor often argue against right-to-work legislation by pointing out its fundamental unfairness to dues-paying union members and by arguing that, in weakening unions, it erodes the wages, benefits, and working conditions of all workers. I myself made such an argument in an earlier post to this…
Although today is April Fool’s Day, these are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories: 70,000+ Rolls of Toilet Paper Arrive for Detroit Firefighters A Bush-League President [Headline of an Article Critical of President Obama] A Mountain Lion…
This guest post is by Dennis Baron and is dated today, April 1, 2013, on his blog The Web of Language. Baron is a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. Deniers of global warming, the big bang, and evolution have a new target: language change. Arguing that language change is just a…