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…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 2 Altbach, Philip G., Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl, eds. American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges. 3rd Edition. Eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2011. In selecting the essays included in this collection, the editors…
Control freaks have lost control of their urge to control. Today, cockroaches, as well as people, can be found in cities of more than 50,000, as well as in open cereal boxes. Before they developed a vaccine, many people were stricken with polo. If one looks at available statistics, it is obvious why birth control…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education: No. 1 Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford U P, 2011. Ginsberg’s book has very quickly become a seminal work in the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to higher education’s…
When Aaron Barlow invited me to write this piece for Academe I had no idea what it would be unleashing. Quickly I receive several requests to republish/repost it, which included one from Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post. When this appeared, a phenomenon began that I still have trouble fully grasping. If you look you…
Historically, three groups share principal responsibility in collegiate governance. Boards of trustees are charged with financial stewardship, administrative oversight, and creating a climate in which all parties, especially the president, can succeed. Presidents and their senior staffs manage the enterprise. The faculty plays a critical role in program development and review. Shared governance also encourages…
New York University sociology professor Jeff Goodwin writes in today’s New York Times: Should administrators be able to enrich themselves… at educational institutions? N.Y.U. is not a Wall Street firm, but a tax-exempt university that gets millions in taxpayer dollars, not least from student loans. In fact, our students have the highest total debt load of any…
Yesterday (3/18/13) at Writing Commons, the open-education home for writers, we had unprecedented interest in our project: 7,071 unique visitors came to our site! What caused our readership to more than double in a day? Professor Denise Comer’s team from Duke University launched its ground-breaking Composition MOOC, English Composition I: Achieving Expertise. In case you missed the…
In last week’s blog, we spoke about the need for America’s colleges and universities to come together in new configurations to create efficiencies and economies of scale. While acknowledging the many reasons not to proceed, we argued that the drive to hold down sticker price, competition with each other and from for-profit and accredited online…
Proponents of standardized testing often set up the straw-man argument that we need assessment and that those against their favored tests, therefore, must be against testing completely. This is nonsense, of course. And soon it will be moot. We are beginning to see the consequences of our testing mania. And they are not good.