In “OSU Fund Managers Pig Out: Scholarships Not Awarded to Students,” an article published by the Columbus Free Press, John Lasker has focused on Ohio State University’s growing endowment and on the degree to which those assets are benefitting the students who attend the university. Here are some of the relevant facts, culled from Lasker’s…
Today launches Campus Equity Week, during which groups plan local actions to draw attention to working conditions of faculty. Campus Equity Week is an annual event started by the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a grassroots coalition of activists in North America working for contingent faculty: adjunct, part-time, non-tenured, and graduate teaching faculty working to bring greater awareness…
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Apollo Education Group, the for-profit education company that operates the University of Phoenix, “is getting destroyed” on the stock market. Dawn Bilodeau, Chief of the Defense Department’s Voluntary Education Program, had released the following statement: “The institution will not be authorized access to DoD installations for the purposes…
Recently we’ve seen a growing amount of attention paid to secret searches for university presidents and the appointment as a consequence of such searches of non-educators who may push a corporatizing agenda, including at the University of Iowa, Miami University, and the University of North Carolina. Last week David A. Sanders, Associate Professor of Biological…
Last month the Board of Regents of the University of California system debated a proposed “Statement of Principles on Intolerance” prompted by concerns about anti-Semitism on campus. The proposal attracted considerable criticism (see also here) and instead the board announced plans to have a task force come up with a new document articulating the system’s…
In recent years there has been growing concentration on how best to improve the transfer process for two-year students seeking a four-year degree. We know that while more than eighty percent of first-year community college students surveyed indicate that they are working toward a four-year degree; fewer than fifteen percent will achieve this goal. With…
Last week, Marywood University’s student newspaper reported that the faculty had taken votes of no confidence in the university’s president and its vice president of business affairs and treasurer. With 135 of the 182 eligible faculty voting, the percentages who expressed no confidence were 71 and 88, respectively. The vote, which took place online between…
Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…
The following op-ed titled, “AAUP: Miami U Making a Big Mistake,” was published several weeks ago in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The authors are Karen Dawisha and Keith Tuma, co-presidents of the Miami University chapter of AAUP, and John McNay, president of the AAUP’s Ohio Conference. _________________________ Last week, news emerged that the Miami University board…
Jonathan Marks at Minding the Campus has denounced the AAUP, claiming that it “takes a sharp left turn.” Marks claims that the AAUP’s Centennial Declaration is “the most nakedly partisan document to emerge from the AAUP in recent memory.” Marks writes, “According to the Declaration, higher education faces one and only one enemy, corporations or business…