The Disappearance of Thomas Riha: An Unsolved Academic Mystery

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Russian historians of my generation may recall the name of Thomas Riha as the editor of the widely-used three-volume Readings in Russian Civilization, published in 1964 (2nd ed., 1969) by the University of Chicago Press and apparently still in print.  The books were important to my own initial education in Russian…

Look Beyond Elites for True Picture of Admissions

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL For thousands of high school students, October marks the start of the college application season. Application deadlines approach, standardized tests and essays are finalized, and this year, an earlier deadline for the FAFSA financial aid application. In a series of reports last month, seasoned higher education journalist Scott Jaschik presented some…

University of Chicago Graduate Workers Vote to Affiliate with AAUP and AFT

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Graduate employees at the University of Chicago have overwhelmingly re-affirmed their choice to organize for collective bargaining with the AAUP, AFT and IFT. Members of Chicago Graduate Students United voted for continued AAUP-AFT-IFT affiliation in a ballot that concluded Tuesday night. Since 2007, GSU has been working to improve conditions for…

Support Harvard Dining Hall Workers!

BY HANK REICHMAN The following is based on reports from the Boston Globe and BuzzFeed. Harvard University’s 600 dining hall workers went on strike this morning, calling for the university to pay them a living wage just a month after the elite school’s current fundraising drive hit a record-breaking $7 billion in donations. Harvard has been…

NYU's Version of Trump University?

BY HANK REICHMAN Very few academics were much surprised when it turned out that Donald Trump’s highly advertised “Trump University” turned out to be nothing more than a sleazy scam.  After all, in some respects Trump’s con was not much different from that engaged in by too many other for-profit “educational” institutions, except, perhaps, that…

UC Faculty Defend Public Education

BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization.  Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…

Dumbing Down “Genius”

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH   Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle   DaVinci   Galileo   Newton   Shakespeare   Franklin   Lincoln   Edison   Tesla   Freud   Einstein   Hawking   Trump _________________________ If you have not been following the news, here are the opening paragraphs of an article written by David A. Graham…