Finding the “Right” Candidate

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…

So, Now What?

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…

In Defense of the Term “Professor”

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…

The Death Knell Rings for Higher Education, Too

A powerful letter from a teacher in North Carolina appeared recently on Diane Ravitch’s blog. Many of us who work in higher education, when we read it, wring our hands and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But it might be that we should not be sending to know for whom…

Underutilized Governance: The Faculty Senate

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…

Limits and Freedom: One Important Dialogue

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…

Taking College Out of the Teacher-Training Process

”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…

CUNY Pathways: Waiting for Leadership

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…