You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following are excerpts from an article on the website of Reason magazine.  To read the full piece go here. A vocational college in La Crosse, Wisconsin, spent more than $100,000 investigating one of its instructors for allegedly saying the local police department was “full of racists.” The school is Western…

crowd rallying with Palestinian flags

Why Academics Should Care about the Oppression of Palestinians

BY DAVID G. EMBRICK AND JOHNNY E. WILLIAMS While Israel is actively erasing Palestinians’ land, livelihoods, stories, personhoods, and histories, the United States is providing Israel with funding, technical assistance, hardware, and even language to carry out its ongoing brutal and violent absorption of Palestine into Israel. Though this violation of international law is widely…

Vision, Values, and Branding—Universities as Corporate Caricatures

I love flying Delta. When I moved from Germany to Minneapolis several years ago Lufthansa was no longer an option. It turned out that leaving behind the bare-bones Teutonic version of customer service was a good thing and I never looked back. Looking at Delta’s corporate values the other day when browsing the company’s website, I noticed the usual suspects—honesty, integrity, and respect—along with explanations seemingly targeted at preschoolers: Always tell the truth and don’t hurt anyone. Did that mean that Delta was run by a bunch of toddlers? No. I am told by my daughter, who works in public relations, that emphasizing basic virtues like honesty helps build consumer trust.

Audrey Watters

Teaching Without Teachers

BY AARON BARLOW At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we…

Hallin's Spheres

Getting Back to Consensus

BY AARON BARLOW What the Eric Rasmusen situation at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (read more about that here and here) brings to the fore is a slipping away from any sort of consensus about what a professor should be and what a student should expect. IU Provost Lauren Robel tried to respond to…

Indiana University's Kelley School of Business

On Indiana University’s Response to Professor Rasmusen

BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I was asked by a publication with an audience of college and university administrators what advice I might have about how to respond to attacks on faculty members’ extramural expression.  I said this: “No matter how controversial the faculty member’s alleged expression may be, do not apologize for it or formally…