BY JONATHAN REES “To believe in ‘the greater good’ is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.” – Joan…
BY BARRY EISENBERG Guest blogger Barry Eisenberg is associate professor in the State University of New York Empire State College’s School for Graduate Studies and a consultant to health-care organizations on strategic planning and governance. He was a hospital executive for twenty years and is coauthor of Mastering Leadership: A Vital Resource for Healthcare Organizations. When…
BY KEVIN R. MCCLURE Guest blogger Kevin R. McClure is assistant professor of higher education in the Watson College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Many colleges and universities in the United States find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They are tasked with educating an increasingly diverse body of…
BY PAUL-OLIVIER DEHAYE Guest blogger Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a former assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Zurich. Surveillance capitalism, described by Shoshana Zuboff, is the logic of accumulation of data leading to commodification of a facet of the global digital life. As remarked by Oliver Stone, Pokemon Go fits in this logic, as it…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Earlier this month, Jeff Selingo wrote in The Washington Post about the coming era of consolidation among colleges and universities. Mr. Selingo based many of his comments on findings from a study by Parthenon-EY Education to which he also contributed. The study concluded that more than 800 American colleges exhibit factors that call into…
BY JOYCE MILAMBILING Guest blogger Joyce Milambiling is professor and coordinator of the TESOL/applied linguistics graduate program in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. Applications for sabbaticals at my university are due next month. The process is competitive, the number of paid leaves for one or two semesters is limited,…
BY MARTIN KICH Here are the lead paragraphs in a photo-essay published by Business Insider: “College football met NASCAR in Tennessee on Saturday night when Tennessee played Virginia Tech in the “Battle at Bristol,” played at Bristol Motor Speedway. “The game set a college football attendance record with 156,990 fans in attendance. That shattered the…
BY MARTIN KICH In an article published by AlterNet, Vijay Prashad reports on the latest and most massive general strike that occurred in India in early September. Although the article has a Marxist slant that may make it seem more op-ed than news report, Prashad gets several things undeniably right: (1) the corporate media has…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Duke University has released the following statement on the NCAA’s decision to pull seven championship tournaments out of North Carolina in the 2016-2017 academic year: “We agree with the NCAA’s decision. Our position has been clear on this matter, which is that this legislation is discriminatory, troubling and embarrassing. We deplore…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier today, UC-Berkeley Dean Carla Hesse rescinded her Sept. 13 suspension of the DeCal course on Palestine. But the controversy over her original suspension remains a hotly contested debate. Dean Hesse writes, “I did not request or require any revisions of the content of the course,” a claim questioned by some…