R. Bowen Loftin, the chancellor of the University of Missouri’s flagship campus at Columbia, will resign, the University of Missouri System’s Board of Curators announced just hours after the system’s president stepped down amid intense student and other protests over racial tensions. Loftin will become the system’s director for research facility development. Although most of…
Note: I was writing this post before John Wilson posted his reaction to the Wolfe resignation. As should be clear, our perspectives differ. As the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed once more to rule on a case involving the consideration of race in college admissions, a wave of protest against campus racism by minority students…
I think that Carbondale, Illinois, the home of Southern Illinois University, must have just about the most options for celebrating Halloween of any college town in the United States. If you want the full list of events related to the holiday, go to the events page on the website maintained by CarbondaleRocks.com: http://www.carbondalerocks.com/taxonomy/term/191. Even if…
Here is how ThinkProgress has summarized this completely counter-intuitive situation: There is some drama surrounding this upcoming event. And it has to do with the debate’s location — the University of Colorado Boulder, or CU-Boulder. Since September, there’s been an twinge of animosity among some students who claim they were misled about what housing a…
Writing for Nation of Change, Paul Buchheit has provided a very succinct but comprehensive overview of how corporatization has had a very damaging impact on higher education. In his article “Higher Education: Capitalism at Its Most Despicable,” Buchheit focuses on five inter-linked phenomena that are undermining the value of higher education because they undermine the…
In “OSU Fund Managers Pig Out: Scholarships Not Awarded to Students,” an article published by the Columbus Free Press, John Lasker has focused on Ohio State University’s growing endowment and on the degree to which those assets are benefitting the students who attend the university. Here are some of the relevant facts, culled from Lasker’s…
Last month the Board of Regents of the University of California system debated a proposed “Statement of Principles on Intolerance” prompted by concerns about anti-Semitism on campus. The proposal attracted considerable criticism (see also here) and instead the board announced plans to have a task force come up with a new document articulating the system’s…
In recent years there has been growing concentration on how best to improve the transfer process for two-year students seeking a four-year degree. We know that while more than eighty percent of first-year community college students surveyed indicate that they are working toward a four-year degree; fewer than fifteen percent will achieve this goal. With…
Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…