This is a guest post by Mihran Aroian and Michelle L. Damiani, contributors to the September-October 2015 issue of Academe. Mihran Aroian is a lecturer in the Management Department of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and was the first faculty member in residence in the Office of the Dean of Students, Student Judicial Services. Raymond…
I don’t know how much I can add to this item from the political blog Talking Points Memo (the headline says it all): “Police in Texas Arrest Muslim Teen Who Brought Homemade Clock to School.” Read it and weep! UPDATE: President Obama has invited the teenage scientist to the White House for Astronomy Night, to…
Here is the summary of a study sponsored by the Department of Education and distributed as part of the DoE’s daily newsletter What’s New: Institute of Education Sciences for U.S. Department of Education. Comparing Success Rates for General and Credit Recovery Courses Online and Face to Face: Results for Florida High School Courses Region:…
A recent international study has thrown a bucket of cold water on the heated frenzy for computer-assisted and online education. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has an authoritative program for assessing school education quality in its 34 member countries, has published a report demonstrating that increased computer use in classrooms may…
There’s an article on Wired about something called a “Camera Restricta,” a prototype developed by Philipp Schmidt for a camera that, if “it identifies more than 35 photos taken in a given location—about 115 feet in any direction from where you’re standing—the camera’s shutter retracts and blocks the viewfinder so you can’t take a photo.”…
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…