A recent international study has thrown a bucket of cold water on the heated frenzy for computer-assisted and online education. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has an authoritative program for assessing school education quality in its 34 member countries, has published a report demonstrating that increased computer use in classrooms may…
The September-October 2015 issue of Academe magazine begins with two articles focusing on disturbing trends in public education. Both articles point to increasing private sector influence as a threat to the integrity of public education. In an essay adapted from his address at the AAUP’s 2015 annual meeting, journalist Juan González argues that public education…
The most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine includes a very thought-provoking article by Frederick deBoer, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in English at Purdue University. In “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.,” deBoer considers the whole gamut of ramifications of the increasing corporatization of our universities. After very succinctly but…
The following is an op-ed piece by Susan Gubernat, Professor of English at California State University, East Bay and a member of the CSU Academic Senate. It was published in the Sacramento Bee on September 7. Tuition dollars have overtaken state funding in supporting public higher education in California, as is true throughout the country.…
If the kind of mass strike reported in my previous post on labor unrest in India have become historical curiosities in the U.S., strikes by faculty and students at American universities do still occur, even if relatively rarely—and very rarely in tandem. But this past week at Central University of Hyderabad, both faculty and students…
A supplementary Report on the AAUP-Censured Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge appeared today. It deals with the dismissal of Teresa Buchanan: Buchanan, a specialist in early childhood education with an unblemished eighteen-year performance record, was being evaluated for promotion to full professorship when a district school superintendent and an LSU student filed complaints against her,…
For the first time, this year’s Mindset List includes an addendum—a list of slang words that will be familiar to most members of the class of 2019 and that presumably have become more widely used, even if they were not coined, over this past year. The list includes somewhat conversational definitions of the terms and…
2. Google has always been there, in its founding words, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” 3. They have never licked a postage stamp. 14. Cell phones have become so ubiquitous in class that teachers don’t know which students are using them to take notes and which ones are planning a…
The following map was included in an article by Libby Nelson, published by Vox. The map originally appeared in an article by Sandhya Kambhampati and Meredith Myers in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It shows how long it would take a student working half-time at a minimum wage job to earn enough to cover one…
The Yes Men — whose slogan is “impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues” — delivered a satirical speech yesterday at the Iowa City Public Library wherein they posed as representatives of the Iowa Regents, as well as the private consulting firm that is doing the…