BY MARTIN KICH The publication of a new biography of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, written by his now elderly “step-sister,” Annye Anderson, with the assistance of Preston Lauterbach. As with just about everything else associated with Johnson, his blood relation to Annye Anderson is actually not quite…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On behalf of PEN America and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, we invite you to join us on May 27 for a day of action to condemn this scourge; celebrate Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander writers; and to raise your voice to call out hate in all its heinous forms.…
BY JEFFREY ISAAC Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He posted these thoughts about reopening IU on his personal blog, and we are reposting them with his permission. On Thursday, May 21, I received an e-mail from Indiana University President Michael McRobbie addressed to all IU colleagues.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Our administration has asked our chapter to meet with them to discuss budget shortfalls. Noeleen McIlvenna, our chapter president, and other members of our executive committee recruited groups of faculty who have done detailed research on multiple “cost centers” on which the university has not adjusted its spending despite the financial…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Science magazine reports the following: Seventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won a Nobel Prize [on May 21] asked Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported…
BY HANK REICHMAN No sooner had I posted my COVID-19 and Higher Education annotated reading list, than two pieces appeared that also deserve attention. The first is by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University. Her book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, is…
BY AARON BARLOW What concerns me, as we move into an educational situation where all teachers are going to have to be prepared, of necessity, to shift from face-to-face to online teaching situations, is that we are being asked to forget about our skills in one as we make a transition to the other. We…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. While its focus is on the University of California its arguments are as relevant for other public research and teaching universities. Should university officials be fatalistic about Covid-powered cuts to their core educational budgets? Or should they work 24/7 on their state…
BY MARTIN KICH Empty Exercises in Planning without Much Meaningful Preparation Francois Furstenberg, a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, has written an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education that is one of the most lucid and impassioned dissections of what’s wrong with American higher education that I have ever read—and I have…
BY NOLAN HIGDON AND MICKEY HUFF The following essay appeared on Project Censored’s website and is reposted with permission. The response to COVID-19 by governing institutions has altered the lives and practices of people across the nation, including the students, faculty, and staff in higher education. One of the biggest changes in educational institutions has…