People are the same everywhere, I guess. That cliche stared me in the face this morning, when I saw over 30 new comments on the statement we published signed by a long list of scholars on the upcoming visit by Indian Prime Minister Naarendra Modi to a Silicon Valley. Five more have appeared while I’ve…
I usually try to limit my posts on this blog to issues directly involving higher education. But as AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum has pointed out, “the attack on higher education as a public good is a political attack” that “requires us to respond by entering the arena of politics.” And today, via Paul Krugman’s blog,…
Yesterday’s NLRB’s decision on the collective-bargaining rights of employees hired through “temp” agencies has meant that very little attention has been paid to a decision handed down yesterday by an NLRB Administrative Law Judge. Although the change in how contingent employees are defined has potentially broad direct ramifications and signals an important, fundamental shift in…
When I was in graduate school at Lehigh University, Darryl Dawkins was playing professional basketball for the Philadelphia 76ers. He was part of the team assembled around Julius Erving and coached by Billy Cunningham, and they were among the best teams in the league year after year, in a few instances coming tantalizing close to…
As faculty who engage South Asia in our research and teaching, we write to express our concerns about the uncritical fanfare being generated over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley to promote “Digital India” on September 27, 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley highlights the role of a country that…
The Yes Men — whose slogan is “impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues” — delivered a satirical speech yesterday at the Iowa City Public Library wherein they posed as representatives of the Iowa Regents, as well as the private consulting firm that is doing the…
The progressive blog Daily Kos has distributed this photo in their daily e-mail of “Recommended” stories. It is a photo of a man thanking firefighters for saving his home from the massive wildfires in Washington State, and they titled the item that includes the photo “This One Weird Pic Destroys Ayn Rand.” _________________________ …
Phil Magness keeps attributing the growth in the percentage of part-time faculty to the rise of the for-profit universities. But his own chart seems to show that that impact has been less than one might expect. Notice that the percentage of part-time faculty at all institutions is 47%, only .4% higher than the total for…
Writing for the Athens Messenger, Sarah Guinn reports that Hocking College in southeastern Ohio has fired 13 faculty members for lack of adequate credentials. Here are the opening paragraphs of the article: “Between July and early August, Hocking College ‘released’ 13 full-time members of the faculty—some of whom had been there more than 20 years—citing…