Throughout this seemingly endless electoral campaign, most Americans were told more than they ever wanted to know about the deficiencies of the two major-party candidates for the presidency. (I say “most Americans” because some of our friends and neighbors somehow managed to remain uninformed, under-informed, and undecided into the last days of the campaign; so…
This is a guest post by Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years. He recently became president of the SLU chapter of AAUP. Father Lawrence Biondi, president of Saint Louis University, is widely recognized, off and on campus, as having constructed, over the…
It certainly wasn’t Obama’s education policies that led me to support him. Between Obama and the Republicans there is little daylight. Both sides of our “great” political divide have fallen under the spell of the education “reformers,” the corporatists who want to wrest control of education (and education dollars) from the public sector, making it…
Dr. Brian C. Mitchell is the retired president of Bucknell University and former president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is the president of Brian Mitchell Associates and director of the Edvance Foundation. He can be reached at: bmitchell@edvancefoundation.org A great number of us within the higher ed community are watching with interest the developments in…
At the AAUP Shared Governance Conference this past weekend, I listened to quite a few panelists talk about the importance of the Faculty Senate as a vehicle for shared governance in our colleges and universities. I won’t go into detail on the panels right now, only saying that I hope to convince many of those…
At the end of an article of his published yesterday in The New York Times, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says: Students can’t learn how to navigate democracy and engage with their fellow citizens if they are forced to think twice before they speak their mind. Well… actually they can, and…
”I don’t think the higher education programs are going away, and that wouldn’t be my intention.” So says Shael Polakow-Suransky of New York City’s Department of Education. Nice, but Education Departments are not likely to be too happy with the intention of moving teacher training from certification programs in colleges and universities to in-house programs (though…
This is a guest post by Yen Tran, a legal fellow in the AAUP’s Washington office. On Wednesday, I attended part of the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the case Fisher v. University of Texas. As a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, a minority student, a Texas resident, and someone…
Over the past three weeks, I’ve been thinking a great deal about CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein’s message to the faculty about the Queensborough Community College uproar. That it doesn’t sit well with many faculty members should be obvious from even a cursory reading (Pathways, for those who don’t know, is a top-down CUNY initiative aimed…