The following item is another one from Futility Closet (http://www.futilitycloset.com/). It is re-posted here with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates delivered to your e-mail each morning. ************************* When PLAFSEP magazine asked its readers to nominate the silliest library subject heading, the hands-down winner was “Buttocks (In…
The following item has appeared in Futility Closet [http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/05/17/in-brief/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FutilityCloset+%28Futility+Closet%29] In 1962, botanist Reid Moran published an article in the journal Madroño recounting his collection of a bush rue on a mountaintop in Baja California. The paper’s title was “Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker f. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of About 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 6 Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York: Fordham U P, 2008. In this seminal work of the corporatization of American universities, Frank Donoghue offers a much longer historical view than most other authors focusing…
The AAUP released several important reports this week that deserve a close reading. The AAUP Statement on the Affordable Care Act and Part-Time Faculty Positions criticizes colleges that seek to deny coverage to adjunct faculty who work 30 hours a week under the Obamacare law, by cutting classes or failing to recognize the actual hours…
In past blogs, I’ve chronicled the development of Writing Commons, the Open Education Home for Writers, with hopes that my experiences developing an Open Education Resource (OER) might be of interest to faculty across the disciplines. I’ve argued that faculty might want to consider contributing to Writing Commons or other OERs that are peer-reviewed, that…
I’m getting rather tired of finding myself agreeing with Stanley Fish–but it has happened again. Though I have admired Fish’s intellect and verbal ability for some thirty years now, only recently have I found myself nodding in agreement with things he writes. What bothers me is that I suspect either 1) I wasn’t reading him…
Michael Gartner has an excellent op-ed in the Des Moines Register today about the serious threat to academic freedom posed by Iowa State president Steve Leath, who has banned the Harkin Institute from conducting research on agriculture without getting the approval of another research institute on campus, the Center for Agricultural Research and Development (CARD).…
This is a guest post by Zachary Schrag, a professor of history at George Mason University. He was a member of the subcommittee which released the report discussed below. Professor Schrag also maintains the Institutional Review Blog. A subcommittee of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has released a new report, Regulation of Research on…
The United States Air Force Academy is in many ways like any other elite university. Students pick a major, attend class, join clubs, and play sports. Faculty generally teach three or four courses per semester, and do research and service work. But as Jeff Dyche, a former teacher at the AFA, explains in the new…