Impacts of Prestige Seeking in Higher Education

BY DESIREE ZERQUERA Guest blogger Desiree Zerquera, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research focuses on the structuring of access and opportunity for marginalized students, particularly within urban universities. With fall recruitment in full swing, many colleges and universities may be eager to tout…

Their Future Is, After All, More at Stake than Ours

BY MARTIN KICH These are the results of a presidential polling of K-8 students conducted by Scholastic. The first of these students should be eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election. I think that the results are fairly remarkable, given that the professoriate has not yet had the opportunity to indoctrinate these students with…

Sandusky Costs Penn State Almost $10 Million More in One Week

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from the Department of Education’s Office of Communications: The U.S. Department of Education today announced that it is seeking to impose on Penn State University a record fine of nearly $2.4 million for failing to comply with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act after a comprehensive…

Free Market Centers: Academic or Political?

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past few years this blog has posted a number of items related to the work of the conservative North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.  In March, 2015, John Wilson reported that the center had praised the decision of the University of North Carolina Board of…

A CUNY Student Bill of Rights

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN CUNY Rising, a coalition of the AAUP-affiliated Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and other community and student allies working to build support for public higher education and the City University of New York (CUNY) has issued “A CUNY Student Bill of Rights,” launching a petition campaign to support investment in higher education…

Nothing Certain But Death & Taxes? Not for Higher Ed.

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Rick Seltzer reported recently in Inside Higher Education on a complex decision by Princeton University to settle litigation with neighboring homeowners who argued that the University was a profit-making institution and therefore subject potentially to millions of additional dollars in taxes annually. Arrangement Doesn’t Settle Issue of Tax Exemption The arrangement…

Freedom and Repression at the U of Chicago

BY JOHN K. WILSON I thought I was reading a campus newspaper from the 1950s when I saw this headline yesterday in the Chicago Maroon: “Communist Plans To Defy Campus Ban.” Suddenly, the University of Chicago has become the epicenter of several free speech controversies. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to write big…

Ugly Blacklist Posters Spur Resistance

BY HANK REICHMAN In previous posts to this blog I have criticized the blacklisting activities of two pro-Israel organizations, the Amcha Initiative and Canary Mission.  The former group published a list of 218 faculty members in Middle East studies at U.S. colleges and universities who signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel…