I have read the entire fifty-six page opinion of Judge Harry D. Leinenweber, United States District Court, for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, who ruled that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign could not sustain an argument for dismissal of many counts brought by Steven G. Salaita’s lawsuit. The judge has a rhetorical grace that not only…
The sudden resignation yesterday by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise now has a clear explanation: the U of I announced today that Wise and other administrator were using personal email accounts to engage in secret discussions about sensitive matters, and released new emails about the Salaita case. In one email to a…
In 2012, I presented a paper at the Modern Language Association annual meeting that caused a small splash, especially for one line, “Blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.” There was a great deal of support for my position, but also quite a few who took umbrage. Most of these, I…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
Burke, James Lee. A Morning for Flamingoes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. In James Lee Burke’s novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, the Louisiana setting is a character as vividly drawn as the protagonist himself. The bayou country is, at once, a lush paradise and the dismal swamp. The plantation architecture harks back to an ante-bellum splendor or…
Below is the UIUC news release, which is posted here: http://uofi.uillinois.edu/emailer/newsletter/77294.html Phyllis M. Wise steps aside as Urbana-Champaign campus chancellor Returns to faculty role, effective August 12 August 6, 2015 URBANA–University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise announced in a statement today that she will step aside as chancellor and vice president of the…
The title of this post is, of course, a misleading tease if you, the reader, are expecting some sort of summary of Donald Trump’s positions on higher-education issues. The Trump campaign’s website includes no “issues” section presenting the candidate’s positions on higher education or on anything else. So, what is the point of this post?…
Steven Salaita, a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies program, was fired a year ago with a summary dismissal for tweets that were construed as lacking civility. A federal judge, Harry D. Leinenweber of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, has ruled against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
George Siemens first gained prominence in 2008 when he helped invent the massive, open, online course, better known by its acronym, the MOOC. MOOCs quickly evolved into something rather different from what Siemens had imagined, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing to head up the Gates-funded MOOC Research Initiative, which seeks to bring hard…
