BY JOHN K. WILSON MacMurray College in southern Illinois, which announced yesterday that it will be closing its doors in May after operating for 174 years, was the first college I ever attended. Well, sort of. It was a summer math camp for high school students, with the lure of receiving college credit for attendance.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Rev. Joseph Lowery, known as the “dean” of the Civil Rights Movement, died yesterday at the age of 98. His list of accomplishments bringing justice to America is so long that many obituaries of him have overlooked a key one: He was the last surviving figure from the New York Times…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Before the COVID-19 pandemic absorbed everyone’s attention, brought much of the country to a halt, and pushed higher education, what continues of it, online, the higher ed community was focused on the remarkable wildcat strike of graduate student employees that began at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and…
BY AARON BARLOW I am keeping technological interfaces with students to a bare minimum out of compassion and to assist learning. My students have enough to deal with right now; they don’t need additional troubles from platforms they don’t know and technologies they may not be able to access. They are New York City residents…
BY DIANE KLEIN The following is reposted with permission from Dorf on Law. It is the fourth in a series on online teaching in the context of the global pandemic. The previous posts are here, here, and here. Diane Klein is Professor of Law at the University of La Verne. In two recent posts, I…
BY HANK REICHMAN City College of San Francisco (CCSF) has placed Chancellor Mark Rocha on paid administrative leave effective immediately, the college board’s president announced on Monday. Board of Trustees President Shanell Williams declined to provide a reason for the move. However, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that An internal auditor told the trustees in…
BY SUSAN E. RAMLO Academics and other university stakeholders are often unaware of their biases, privilege, and naivety regarding free speech issues on campus. An eighty-year-old research method called Q methodology (“Q”) revealed this in a continuation of my 2018 research.[i] Institution-A (the focus of this study) has been struggling with declining enrollment, financial troubles,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the University of Wisconsin at Madison began instruction online, a move that the great majority of colleges and universities have made or are making in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s what English professor Caroline Gottschalk Druschke told the Wisconsin State Journal about the move: “None of us are going…
BY AARON BARLOW We’re learning a lot about distance education right now. As a group, that is, as faculty. Few of us have ever bothered with using digital tools, much less considered teaching solely online or even in a hybrid situation. We’ve assumed, correctly, that distance education is a pale approximation of learning without electronic…