BY AARON BARLOW There’s an essay on Chronicle,com by NYU professor Eric Klinenberg called “What Trump’s Win Compels Scholars To Do.” After discussing the overreach of Big Data, Klinenberg writes: There’s one other thing that universities must do better: teach student skills for learning, discerning, reasoning, and communicating in an informational environment dominated by quick…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are excerpts from two articles written by Becky Johnson for the Smoky Mountain News [http://www.smokymountainnews.com/], passed on to me by Connor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus: WCU Faculty Closely Monitoring $2 Million Koch Gift Faculty members have lauded administration for giving them a seat at the table. That wouldn’t happen…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent interview by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson in which Johnson declares, “we need destructive technology for our higher education system.” This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted to do with his “Trump University.” As I note in my new book, Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted…
BY GEFEN BAR-ON SANTOR Guest blogger Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa. I often feel in competition with the Internet as I search for materials to make my lectures more stimulating—a word many students use to describe what they want. No matter how engaging I try to become, there is still…
BY JEFF BAKER The word overload can have more than one meaning to higher education faculty. It can mean increasing class size or adding additional course sections to the faculty member’s required minimum teaching load. While many full-time faculty welcome overloads as an opportunity to increase income, they are usually a bad deal. Adjunct…
BY AARON BARLOW When you rely on the numbers, you count out the people. How often have we heard that? How frequently do we remind ourselves that it’s the people—in our case as educators, the students—who matter most, the individuals and not the numbers that reflect the aggregate? Yet our actions continue to be toward…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Crain’s Cleveland Business, Rachel Abbey McCafferty reports on how Cleveland’s colleges and universities are being impacted by the Republican National Convention: “Cleveland State University’s second summer session is getting underway on Monday, July 18 — the first day of the convention. With the parking restrictions and road closures in the…
BY KELLY HAND Kelly Wilz, author of the May–June Academe article “A Day in the Life of a Public University Professor in Wisconsin,” recently won the 2015–16 Teacher Excellence Award given by the student body of the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County. Becoming an award-winning teacher is never easy, but as Wilz’s article demonstrates, it has…
BY AARON BARLOW Maybe we can blame it all on Sputnik. Sixty years ago, next year, the Russians panicked the Americans via satellite… literally. Suddenly, research had to be sped up in new ways, and consolidated. Suddenly, the centers of the scholarly world were physicists and others whose thought could have practical application for military…