On May 16-18, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education’s 7th National Gathering drew nearly 100 faculty, student and organizational leaders to the Desmond Hotel in Albany, New York, where the organization held panel discussions and workshops surrounding a theme of “Building Alliances for Access, Equity and Quality.” The increasing problem of student debt was…
In this morning’s e-mail, I found the following two items, one right after the other: first, from University Business, their daily newsletter with this header, “Four Shot at Seattle Pacific University,” and then from Sen. Patrick Leahy, writing for Stand with Students, “Give students a fair shot: join Elizabeth Warren and me in supporting student…
Although the more overtly political spending of the Koch brothers has received much more attention, the Walton Family Foundation has, not surprisingly, been one of the major supporters of right-wing think tanks and public-policy experiments. Long a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the…
I am posting the following letter to this blog for three reasons: (1) it illustrates the types of complex and specialized issues that state conference leaders are frequently asked to address; (2) in some instances, such as this one, the conference leadership may take the position that there simply was not enough faculty input into…
John Dewey starts off Experience and Education (1938) with this: MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Or, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are…
That’s how Jamienne Studley, Deputy Under Secretary at the Education Department, regards the Obama administration’s proposed system of ranking colleges. “This is not so hard to get your mind around.” Actually, it is. All blenders have a single purpose. They take certain types of organic material and combine them into products of chosen consistency. They can be judged…
One of the major sources of education funding in Missouri is the revenues produced by the state lottery and from riverboat gambling, both of which have been down this year. The state provides 36.76% of the funding for K-12 education, and 16.6% of that funding comes from the lottery and gaming. I could not find…
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…
We are, I hope, going to be hearing a lot about this study (follow the links to download the report itself) over the next few weeks. We already are, to some degree. The study, from Gallup, Purdue University, and the Lumina Foundation, concludes that: if graduates recalled having a professor who cared about them as a…