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…
[This comes from Barbara Bowen of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York and Terrence Martell of the CUNY Faculty Senate.] Dear Colleague: Please click here to sign a petition calling for a moratorium on the implementation of an austerity curriculum at CUNY. And please forward this message widely to…
[Guest Blogger Walter Brasch is a syndicated social issues columnist, the author of 17 books, and a former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. His latest is Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, available at amazon.com, www.greeleyandstone.com, and bookstores. Dr. Brasch was a university professor of mass communications and journalism for 30 years.]…
The 98% of scientists who have been warning of climate change that is perilously close to becoming irreversible have pointed repeatedly to the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. Unfortunately, “global warming” predated “climate change” as the term for this crisis. So, despite considerable video evidence of the ice sheets sliding into the sea, if it…
The idea of shared governance proceeds from the notion that faculty are uniquely qualified to participate in the decision-making process with respect to academic matters. Since just about everything at a university affects academic matters, a healthy campus would solicit faculty input on just about everything. However, with respect to decisions about awarding credit, you’d…