BY LAURA W. PERNA According to a January 2020 Gallup poll, only 27 percent of adults in the United States believe that college is affordable. Democratic presidential candidates have responded to these concerns with proposals for free tuition at community colleges, student loan debt-forgiveness, and more. Some proposals, like increasing the amount of money that…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK Winter 2020 | Vol. 106, No. 1 Contributors to this issue of Academe articulate a broad vision of higher education’s social mission. Articles focus on addressing the needs of working, low-income, and incarcerated students; victories in coalitional student-led organizing; institutional reckonings with the legacy of slavery; and other topics. Follow the links…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Temple University professor Sara Goldrick-Rab probably knows and understands more about how real students today pay for — or are financially incapable of paying for — higher education than anyone else. Her book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, is one of the…
BY AARON BARLOW Old News Department: Selling diplomas as a means to economic success turns them into a commodity—and people find all sorts of ways to pay, if not by work then by cash. When different diplomas are seen as providing different dividends, people angle to get those they believe most valuable, some paying through…
BY AARON BARLOW Second-semester students come into their classrooms as jaded veterans knowing exactly what their status is. They know that the teachers of their core curriculum courses (normally, all that they are taking, this year) are, for the most part, either untried graduate students, adjuncts so harried they have no time for their students,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents passed new rules imposing harsh mandatory penalties on campus protesters who disrupt events. However, Gov. Tony Evers has declared that he plans to reject the new rules. That’s fortunate, because the new rules are quite terrible. In addition to the deplorable practice of…
BY HANK REICHMAN So now it’s come to burning books! The following account comes from The George-Anne, an independent student newspaper at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia: Students at Georgia Southern University burned a book, written by a New York Times contributor, after a Q&A session at her lecture became heated. Jennine Capó Crucet…
BY HANK REICHMAN Despite the presence of the verb “ban” in my headline, this post does not uncover yet another censorious outrage committed by a university administration — well, at least not a very major one. Still, a recent decision by the administration of Columbia University to prohibit its university marching band from performing at…
BY AARON BARLOW Two posts on Facebook recently focused my attention to how we see ourselves in the classroom. In one, the teacher bragged that a student had shouted out that she was the most wonderful teacher ever. In the other, the teacher entered the classroom to find a student sitting at her desk and…