The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education – CFHE for short – is a GRASSROOTS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to support quality higher education. It was initiated in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 2011, by leaders of faculty organizations from 21 states. CFHE’s fifth meeting was held in Columbus, Ohio, on May 17 and 18, 2013.…
This past weekend, I read a few reflections on the meaning of Father’s Day, though the holiday did not occasion anywhere close to as many reflections as were published on either Mother’s Day or Memorial Day. Perhaps the three holidays simply fall too close to each other on the calendar for op-ed writers to keep…
Earlier this year, I posted a review of Saving Higher Education: The Integrated, Competency-Based Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree Program. The book describes an alternative to the two most common “three-year” baccalaureate programs: the Accelerated model and the Prior Learning model. In the Accelerated Model, students essentially take overloads and full summer loads in order to complete…
This is a re-post from the On the Issues blog maintained by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/]. ************************* If you read the news, listen to legislators, or watch TED talks, you might think MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are just about providing free access to high-quality courses for anyone who wants…
This is a re-post from the On the Issues blog maintained by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/]. ************************* After a brief experiment in charging tuition, Germany—the strongest economy in Europe and one of the strongest in the world–is abolishing fees at its colleges and universities. Why? As quoted in a recent…
A cluster of recent articles has addressed the growing issue of access to higher education for students from poor and working-class backgrounds. Published in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann’s “How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich” opens with an assertion that is absolutely true but will come as a major surprise to…
Investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld’s 2012 book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power draws on thirty years of research and three hundred thousand pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to tell the story of the FBI’s covert operations in Berkeley during the 1960s. Focusing on…
Although this year’s commencement addresses by President and Mrs. Obama have been inspiring, engaging, and often humorous—as was Jon Lovett’s, my favorite commencement address, hands down, is one written by Robert Reich to last year’s graduates–but never meant to be delivered in person. It has been reproduced on a fairly large number of progressive blogs,…
Guns on Campus, Discouraging News, Addendum 1 The cable news networks, like the newspapers long before them, have turned “tabloid” coverage of crimes and trials into a staple element of their programming. It may have started with the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, but, if the recent ratings for the coverage of the Jodi…
Jon Lovett, a speechwriter for President Obama, addressed the graduates of Pitzer College on “fighting the culture of bullshit.” What follows is a brief selection from a fuller partial transcript of his commencement address provided through The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/life-lessons-in-fightingthe-culture-of-bullshit/276030/. ************************* One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning it.…