In the September-October issue of Academe, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum writes that administrators and other leaders can take positive steps to help ensure access for all faculty, before specific needs arise. For example, braille nameplates next to all offices can be the norm, so that faculty who need them will feel included from the start. Kerschbaum also points…
In 2010, Wesleyan University began offering courses and holding events in its new College of the Environment, a new interdisciplinary school and associated think tank. Each school year, the College has a broad theme (the first three were stress and vulnerability, water, and environmental justice) and approaches that subject from a variety of viewpoints. In…
Last week, the Queensborough Community College English Department voted to refuse a reduction in workload hours for its First Year Composition courses, supposedly a necessity for the City University of New York’s new Pathways to a Common Core initiative. Vice President Karen Steele then sent an email to the department that seemed to threaten draconian…
At the end of August, the Center for the Future of Higher Education released its second policy report from. The report is titled “Who Is “Professor Staff? And How Can This Person Teach So Many Classes?” It offers a very detailed and deeply unsettling view of how our colleges and universities exploit contingent faculty. The…
If you don’t start building a new organizational program from the ground up but impose it from the top down, you are going to lose control when the program has to be implemented by people with no real commitment to it, no feeling of ownership of it. We’re seeing that right now with implementation of…
Guest blogger Barbara Madeloni of the UMass Amherst School of Education chose to boycott the Teacher Performance Assessment field test via Pearson. As a result, her contract was not renewed. There is a movement for her reinstatement through a petition that can be signed here. The incursion of for profit companies into higher education occurs with willing collaborators. Whether misguided,…
Joel Shatzky is Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Cortland, where he taught from 1968-2005. He presently teaches at Kingsborough Community College. The influence of big-time collegiate sports on the culture and priorities of universities has been a subject of considerable concern over the last few years. According to a recent Knight Foundation report: Presidents of universities with…
Education ‘reformers,’ whether the business model of higher education is failing or not, have their eyes turned toward American colleges and universities. There’s money to be made there, too, an attraction that the ‘reformers’ and their corporate backers cannot resist. That the profits come at the expense of education itself hasn’t bothered them in their…