AAUP Chapter at Miami University Hosts Presentation by Howard Bunsis

In the late afternoon on Thursday, September 24, between 80 and 100 faculty and students at Miami University attended a presentation by CBC Chair Howard Bunsis on the university’s finances. The event was hosted by the relatively new but quickly growing AAUP advocacy chapter at the university. The presentation received fairly detailed coverage in the…

Very Few Tears at Lloyd Jacobs’ Departure from the University of Toledo; The Former President Will Be Remembered for His Almost Singular Disdain for Shared Governance

In June 2010, Jack Stripling wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed reporting on faculty responses to a survey about the performance of University of Toledo president Lloyd Jacobs. Here are the first few paragraphs of that piece, titled “Toledo Chief Raked over Coals”: “In a scathing review of his controversial presidency at the University…

The Faculty as Punching Bag.

I’ve been working on a book about the effect of the Internet on the terms of employment and working conditions of faculty at all levels.  As a result, I’ve read an extraordinary amount of “disruption” literature lately.  You know, Christensen, Carey, et. al.  – all those people who are just chomping at the bit to…

Education Reform Humbuggery

Kevin Carey, writing in The New York Times last July, said this of American colleges and universities: “These organizations are not coherent academic enterprises with consistent standards of classroom excellence. When it comes to exerting influence over teaching and learning, they’re Easter eggs. They barely exist.” This is humbug. It’s an attempt to channel the…

New Leadership Institute: Shared Governance Makes Change "Problematic"

“Change in any industry is difficult, but it is particularly problematic in higher education with its unique culture and history of shared governance.” So begins the description of the first “module” offered by the new Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy, which launches in November, bills itself as “the premier training ground for those…

On the Suborning of Free Speech and Shared Governance at the University of Iowa

By Stephen Kuusisto   When Iowa’s Board of Regents selected J. Bruce Herreld, a businessman with no prior experience in education, as the new president of the University of Iowa they affirmed three principles: the university is now strictly a business, the faculty and students are to be put in their respective places, and those places…