Intrastate athletic rivalries between public universities (e.g., Michigan-Michigan State) frequently spill over into the silliest sorts of comparisons between institutions, which usually ignore their differing missions. That some politicians embrace such comparisons may offer a small glimpse into the extent of their knowledge and the level of their insight into higher education. Take the case…
[excerpted from How Strategic Planning Encourages Academic Capitalism is forthcoming in Sheila Slaughter (Editor), Barrett Jay Taylor (Editor), Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development: Competitive Advantage in Europe, the US, and Canada, Springer For almost 40 years, institutions of higher education have been writing business plans – sometimes called strategic plans or, more pretentiously, academic plans. By anticipating…
The September-October 2015 issue of Academe magazine begins with two articles focusing on disturbing trends in public education. Both articles point to increasing private sector influence as a threat to the integrity of public education. In an essay adapted from his address at the AAUP’s 2015 annual meeting, journalist Juan González argues that public education…
The following is a transcript of President Obama’s remarks yesterday at a town hall meeting in Des Plaines, Iowa: QUESTION: Hi, my name’s Ava. I’m currently a junior at Lincoln High School here on the southside of Des Moines. My question is to you is: I know you don’t want to get involved with the…
::SIGN THE PETITION:: The plight of contingent faculty has been getting a lot of attention in the past couple years, and not just in academic journals with a focus on higher education issues. Mainstream media are catching on and publishing stories about the increased proportion of adjunct positions to total faculty numbers, the pitiful wages paid…
Several weeks ago, I posted an item on the effort to turn three sites associated with the Manhattan Project into a National Park. The post was titled “This Is Where Great-Grandpa Helped to Build the Bomb,” and someone apparently employed by the National Park Service responded by characterizing the post as “uninformed” because, in his…
Dr Paul L. DeVito died suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend of August 22-23, 2015. He had been provost at Saint Xavier University for two years. During his tenure, many witnessed a recrudescence of morale on campus, and an extraordinary commitment to academic freedom, shared governance and faculty activism. He was the greatest administrator I…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
Over the Labor Day weekend, most signatories of the “Faculty Statement on Narendra Modi’s Visit to Silicon Valley” received threats from individuals in South Africa and Canada and email harassment from the Hindu Vivek Kendra, a Hindu nationalist organization affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member. Several letter signatories have also been targeted…
Barragan, James. “’Ask a Mexican’ Columnist to Keynote UT’s Hispanic Month.” Austin American-Statesman [TX] 14 Sep. 2015: B, 1. Gustavo Arellano, the writer behind the nationally syndicated column “Ask a Mexican” and the book “Tacos USA,” which discusses how Mexican food penetrated American culture, will give the keynote speech Tuesday for the University of…