Writing in The New Yorker last month, Dale Russakoff had this to say about today’s education “reformers,” personified (in this case) by New Jersey governor Chris Christie and then-mayor of Newark Cory Booker (who is now, of course, one of the state’s U.S. senators): Decades of research have shown that experiences at home and in neighborhoods…
A new study, The Innovative University: What College Presidents Think About Change in American Higher Education, sponsored by Blackboard and The Chronicle of Higher Education, has this to say about disruption: Well over half of all presidents believe that at least a moderate amount of disruption is needed in higher education. Years ago disruption to higher-education’s business model…
On the evening of Monday, May 5, the deans at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut received an email informing them of a staffing meeting the next day. At that meeting, the deans of certain schools were told that they had a grand total of two days–during final exam week–to consult with department chairs and determine which 16 full-time faculty would be…
Money, the goal of all goals, today is ruining both education and government. When money becomes, as it has, our only measure of value, structures protecting anything else melt before it. As the “business model” is most keenly attuned to profit, it has become the one model for all of our endeavors. In my first “real” job out…
Testimony of John McNay, President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, on House Bill 484, before the Ohio State Senate Finance Committee, on May 13, 2014 Chairman Oelslager, Ranking Member Sawyer, and distinguished members of the Senate Finance Committee: my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio Conference of the American…
The following paragraphs are taken from the opening of an article by Katy Murphy that appeared in the May 12, 2014, edition of the San Jose Mercury News: “San Jose State’s embattled president has issued a public apology, vowing to ‘right the ship’ after a rocky year and widespread criticism led the statewide chancellor to…
One of the things the assessment gurus of corporate-style education don’t like is the idea of professors in complete control of the curriculum and pedagogy in their own classrooms. They want everyone “to be on the same page,” feeling that education has no value unless done in unison. This is the thinking behind most cries…
Henry Giroux, in his new Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, credits the phrase of the title here to sixties radicals. I don’t remember it myself, but it certainly fits the time. College students were feeling empowered even as they were under attack; colleges and universities were places for change, for innovation, and the students felt…
In his new book, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux writes that, “as public intellectuals, academics can do more.” We know that, of course, but it never hurts to hear it again, especially as the crisis in American education–and, following necessarily, in American society–grows. But what does it mean to be a public intellectual? What, in other…
When I read what Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald emailed his team recently, all I could think of was my father: “Understand that by voting to have a union, you would be transferring your trust from those you know — me, your coaches and the administrators here — to what you don’t know — a…