Several months ago, I did a post to this blog on the controversy surrounding the announcement that Geoff Chatas, the CFO of Ohio State University, would be resigning from that position to take a position with the corporate conglomerate with which he had recently negotiated a long-term and lucrative contract to manage the university’s parking…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
Andrew Delbanco, writing in The New York Review of Books, looks over the state of American universities, noting the promise they once represented but writing that: Today this story is stalled. At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our…
In a guest editorial for the Concord Monitor, demographer Peter Franchese argues persuasively that the future of New Hampshire’s economy requires a much larger state investment in public higher education, in particular in its community colleges. After framing the issues with reference to his own family history, Franchese focuses on the following “paradoxes” and “projections”:…
Shortly after the AAUP’s annual membership meeting placed the administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on its list of censured administration for its summary dismissal of Professor Steven Salaita in response to his anti-Israeli comments on Twitter, I received an email from an old friend from the California State University Academic Senate,…
The following paragraphs are taken from an article that Jill Barshay contributed to the Hechinger Report on June 1: “A team of academic researchers found that one third of colleges and universities underestimated actual living expenses by more than $3,000. Another 11 percent of schools overestimated by more than $3,000. In other words, almost half…
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force,” Eric Johnson writes: This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force. Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload…
