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…

Who Counts As an "Educator"?

BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.”  The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…

Irony of the Day

BY MARTIN KICH An alternative title to this post might be “’Redefining The Takers.’” The New York Times has reported the possibility that Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for more than two decades because of a $913,000,000 loss reported in 1995. In response to the story, Trump has asserted that he…

The Political Divide in the Perception of Higher Ed

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a chart summarizing a recent Pew Research survey on how political ideology affects the perception of American institutions: The complete survey, including a link to a detailed breakdown of the results in PDF, can be found at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/from-universities-to-churches-republicans-and-democrats-differ-in-views-of-major-institutions/ Education Dive has provided the following “highlights” of and “insights” about…