The following piece is being re-posted from the Catholic Higher Education Advocate [http://cheausa.org/], which reprinted it from The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper. The Catholic Higher Education Advocate is currently including this op-ed as part of a broader feature story, “Battle Intensifies at Boston College over Shared Governance,” covering the public back and forth between the Boston…
If you haven’t read the letter from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department to Harvard’s Michael Sandel about his “Justice” MOOC through MIT and Harvard’s edX program, you really should. I think it might become a classic document in the history of the long, slow decline of American Higher Education. For one thing, it’s…
Testimony of John McNay, Ph.D., President Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors Before the House Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education Representative Cliff Rosenberger, Chair March 6, 2013 Chairman Rosenberger, Ranking Member Ramos, and distinguished members of the Higher Education Subcommittee: my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio…
Simply publishing material in a certain topic area does not confer on oneself or on one’s employees the expertise or the credentials of professionals in that field. So a publisher of books on government and politics would not necessarily have any special expertise in governing or in running a political campaign. Likewise, a publisher of…
The following is an open letter to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College. Dear Chairperson Wolff, members of the Board of Trustees, and Chancellor Hyman: When I spoke to you last November, my concern in my very brief remarks had to do exclusively with the issue of…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3 Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012. This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 2 Altbach, Philip G., Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl, eds. American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges. 3rd Edition. Eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2011. In selecting the essays included in this collection, the editors…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education: No. 1 Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford U P, 2011. Ginsberg’s book has very quickly become a seminal work in the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to higher education’s…
This week, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released a draft statement, entitled “Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance”, which in part originated with the following presentation that I have given at several state conference meetings over the past year. A couple of years ago, I served as chair of a committee…