Walker Suspends Presidential Campaign: Wrecking Wisconsin Not a Springboard to the White House After All

This from the Washington Post: “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suspended his presidential campaign today, effectively ending a once-promising GOP presidential bid that collapsed over the summer. “Walker, who tumbled from top-tier status amid tepid debate performances and other missteps, had pulled back from other early-voting states in favor of a heavy focus on Iowa, where…

Largely Lost in the Debate (and the Diatribes) over Indian PM Modi’s Visit to Silicon Valley Is a Complex Issue That Should Resonate with Americans

In the September 17 issue of the New York Times, Manu Joseph argues that the Modi government has been “Protecting the Internet, but Depriving India’s Poor.” Joseph highlights the fact that about three out of four Indians have never accessed the Internet because they cannot afford to pay for an Internet connection—even though a very…

From Veblen's House to Our House

In the July, 2015 issue of The Baffler, Siva Vaidhyanathan, one of today’s most insightful public intellectuals and a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia,  sparked by Thorstein Veblen’s 1918 book The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men, examines the current state of American higher education…

U.S. Higher Education News for September 20, 2015

  Burrows, Sister Joanne [President Clarke University]. “College More Valuable than Simple, Straight Path.” Telegraph Herald [Dubuque, IA] 20 Sep. 2015: A, 17. Current debates about what a college education should be, and be for, bring to mind the theorem: “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” That works until you leave…

U.S. Higher Education News for September 19, 2015

  Bowie, Liz. “The Towson U. Community Honors Maravene Loeschke; Memorial Pays Tribute to Former President Who Died of Cancer in June.” Baltimore Sun 19 Sep. 2015: A, 2. They sang, danced and told stories about Maravene Loeschke at Towson University on Friday, as hundreds celebrated the life of the late university president described as…

Learning to be Brave: Back to School Edition

I did not become a college professor because I am particularly brave. I started a Masters’ program in American Studies at the University of Minnesota twenty-five years ago, thinking that it would enable me to teach community college, to piece together what the writer Jackie Regales calls “A Patchwork Life” of writing and teaching. I…

Mission Matters in American Higher Education

Earlier this month, Adam Davidson wrote a fascinating yet deeply troubling piece in the New York Times titled: “Is College Tuition Really Too High?” Davidson explores the relationship between the student and the aid offered to the student by the college or university in which the student enrolls. He concludes, “Our system gives three times…

U.S. Higher Education News for September 18, 2015

  “Editorial: Measuring the Payoff of College.” Tampa Bay Times 18 Sep. 2015: A, 10. President Barack Obama wisely abandoned his plan for the federal government to rank all 7,000 American institutions of higher learning, from Harvard to hairdressing schools. But the U.S. Education Department has done something smarter. It has created a vast database…

A Newspaper Report on Administrative Bloat: Some Remarks on the Sum of the Details and on Some of the Specific Details

On September, 17, an investigative article by Lance Lambert and Josh Sweigart was published in the Dayton Daily News. Its title is “’Bloat’ Driving Rise in Tuition; Administrative Pay Rising Faster than Cost for Instruction.” For too long, administrators have been, at best, acquiescing to and, at worst, reinforcing to state legislators and to the public…