This week, Politico published an article by Matt Valentine titled “Texas Just Made College Less Safe: University Leaders Have Thought That Guns on Campus Are a Bad Idea since 1824. So Why Do States Keep Allowing It”—a very provocative title and slant for Politico. Here are the opening paragraphs: “When the founding fathers wrote that…
AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, in his column in the May/June issue of Academe, when did the growth and vigor of the American middle class–and of American higher education–end? The reversal began under the Carter administration and accelerated during the Reagan years. Why did it end? The answer has been well documented in the book Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.…
Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Born into an affluent Eastern family, Owen Wister had a varied and successful literary career, producing novels, short fiction, plays, poetry, essays, and nonfiction books. Today, however, he is best known for one novel, The Virginian, which formalized the Wild West tales…
Last Friday afternoon the Wisconsin Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee declared war on the University of Wisconsin’s faculty. By a vote of 12-4 the Committee approved an omnibus spending bill that would impose drastic budget cuts and, most important, eliminate tenure from state statute. The committee also approved adding new limits to the faculty role in…
The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…
In January, Joan Axelrod-Contrada wrote an article for the Boston Globe in which she profiled a number of professionals who have moved from the private sector into higher education. Beyond providing such personalized illustrations of what is involved in such a change in career direction, the article explains why many skills are not only transferable…
One of the articles that I read on LSU’s “lazy river leisure center” mentioned that Texas Tech also has a “lazy river.” A quick Google image search produced the following images of “aquatic centers” at a number of universities. I am not suggesting that these are the most elaborate “aquatic centers” at universities, or even…
The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…
Last week, Erik Brady, Steve Berkowitz and Christopher Schnaars wrote about the growing money pressures faced by “non-power 5” college athletic programs in USA Today. They found that “by the NCAA’s benchmark for self-sufficiency, just 24 of the 230 public schools in Division I stand on their own, up from 20 a year earlier, “…
In 1928, Horatio Alger: A Biography Without a Hero by Herbert R. Mayes appeared. For over 40 years, it was the “go to” source for information about the iconic boys’ writer. Mayes parlayed the success of his book into an editing career crowned, in the sixties, with a term as president of McCall Corporation, publisher…