The graphic below comes from the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the risk of offending both the Gates Foundation and those who can’t stand its work on education, I thought I’d post it since it displays well the great diversity of the higher education student body in the U.S., even if…
Students at elite institutions sometimes recognize economic inequality ahead of the universities’ administrations, especially when the universities themselves are exploiting their own workers. Here are the opening paragraphs from a news report from WRAL.com about such a situation at Duke University: “Students who have been occupying a building on the Duke University campus since April…
Huffington Post has published an article by Tyler Kingkade with the headline: “Tennessee Lawmakers Consider Bill That Could Chill Free Speech.” It is not an especially shocking headline because we have now become very used to the reality that the Far Right sees no hypocrisy in defining unlimited corporate political contributions as the exercise of…
BY ZACHARY R. WOOD Guest blogger Zachary R. Wood is a student at Williams College. Yesterday, Ferentz Lafargue wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, arguing that student objection to bringing speakers with offensive views to campus is a sign of strength. In the piece, Lafargue makes several points with which I concur: “Students whose families…
Here are two corporate news releases distributed by University Business that suggest that Barnes and Noble and Amazon are positioning themselves to compete with each other, in each other’s areas of strength, for increased shares of the still lucrative textbook market. _________________________ Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE: BNED), one of the largest contract operators…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Paul Fain had an interesting story in Inside Higher Education this month. Mr. Fain looked at transfer success rates for students who participated in the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society and the Dell Scholars program to determine some of the factors contributing to higher graduation and transfer rates for participants in…
BY HANK REICHMAN Even as gourmet and gluten-free choices expand at some elite college eateries, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Katharine Broton have published an excellent, if deeply disturbing, article on “The Hidden Hunger Problem on Campus.” For many it may be hard to believe, but the evidence is clear that a significant portion of the student…
There has been a great deal of interest in the Open Syllabus Project, including an article in The New York Times. I thought I’d take a look at it and see what tentative conclusions I could draw (a la Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading) about what is being taught in my field of English in the United States.…
This is a guest post by Howard V. Hendrix, who teaches literature and writing at California State University–Fresno. He is the author of six novels and many short stories, poems, and essays. A year has now elapsed since the events that prompted me to write “Professor, Say Hi To The Devil!” To really understand this…