BY MONICA BLACK, BEN LEE, AND MARY MCALPIN Ever since students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, began organizing an annual event called Sex Week, state lawmakers have been trying to kill it. According to the students who organize it, the aim of Sex Week, which ran from March 31 to April 5 this year,…
BY AARON BARLOW The City University of New York is quietly floating the idea of consolidating majors across its campuses. Rather than a Physics major at City College, Hunter, Baruch, my own New York City College of Technology and all the rest, students would be funneled into one CUNY campus. This, I suspect, is seen…
BY DAVE NALBONE Recently, Purdue University Global (PUG) announced that it would abide by federal laws prohibiting the use of forced arbitration to resolve disputes by its students, which until then had been a requirement of its students in order to enroll. This predatory practice dated to PUG’s former iteration, the for-profit and predatory Kaplan…
BY HANK REICHMAN On February 27, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette, published an article, “Iowa universities face rising mental health needs.” In that article, which reports a significant increase in the number of students seeking mental health assistance at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, we read the…
BY DAVE NALBONE AND BILL MULLEN Below is the text of a press release issued by the Indiana chapters of the AAUP on February 25. West Lafayette, IN — Indiana chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) won a major victory for students and faculty in Indiana by forcing the online public university,…
BY LESLIE MARSH Guest blogger Leslie Marsh is an undergraduate in her senior year at Wright State University (WSU). Below is her response to a letter from Alpana Sharma, chair of the English languages and literature department, notifying her about the conversion of her full-semester course to a compressed seven-week course due to the ongoing…
BY PAMELA A. SCHULZE Pamela A. Schulze, president of the Akron AAUP chapter, submitted the following open letter in support of the faculty at Wright State University, who are striking for quality higher education. I am writing this letter as President of the University of Akron Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which…
Honestly? And the Schrader administration is trying to characterize faculty as not caring enough about our students. One of my colleagues has made this meme: Please sign our petition of support and distribute it to your contact lists and over your social media accounts: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stand-with-wright-state-faculty. Please visit our social media accounts and express your support…
BY HANK REICHMAN Proponents of the “completion agenda,” which strives to ensure that more students graduate from college, often fail to recognize a major reason that students fail to succeed or drop out: food insecurity and hunger. The problem has been highlighted on this blog (see, for examples, here and here) and by a growing…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University, and Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), have written a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Haidt and…