Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered a “major” address on higher education. As Inside Higher Ed’s account put it, his call for “a greater focus on student outcomes at colleges was an effort to pivot away from discussions that he said are focused too narrowly on the burden of student loan debt.” Duncan argues:…
In Colorado, somewhere between 70% and 80% of all community college faculty members teach part-time on term-to-term contracts. Yesterday, July 27, following the AAUP’s successful 2015 Summer Institute in Denver, AAUP-CBC President Howard Bunsis and I traveled to nearby Louisville, Colorado, to join some of those community college faculty members at a mini-Institute (the “Mini-Innie”)…
From Cathy Davidson, “Universities Are No More Illusory Than Journalists: Rsp to Kevin Carey and NYT”: The reputational system of the classroom and of universities is all we’ve got. We need to build upon and improve upon that system–peer mentoring, honor codes, honor systems, and other internal checks and balances have been shown to have…
While being interviewed by Breitbart on Sirius XM radio, Mike Huckabee said the following: “This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. He’s so naive he would trust the Iranians, and he would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiot thing,…
AcademeBlog invited Jay Schalin, Director of Policy Analysis at The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to respond to a critique by John K. Wilson of Schalin’s essay on Gene Nichol and the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund at UNC-Chapel Hill. Below is Schalin’s response, which is crossposted at the Pope Center. No…
By Alice Dreger, reprinted from AliceDreger.com. Last night I dreamed I had a date with Donald Trump. We were in the Trump International Hotel and Tower® in Chicago, in a ballroom that looks out over the river. I was wearing my black Banana Republic dress, the one I wore to the Guggenheim Fellowship reception in 2008,…
These are dark days for conservatives: 7 years of President Obama, gay marriage spreading across the land, health insurance coverage growing every day, and a collection of mediocre Republican candidates that make the words “President Clinton” seem like the future rather than the past. It’s enough to make a conservative blurt out “Jiggery-pokery” and bemoan…
Perhaps because we have come to assess businesses through the “bottom line,” that is, through numbers, we have begun to feel that everything can and should be quantifiable. We put grades on restaurants, as though a spot check can really tell us how safe the food is to eat (it can’t). We put grades on…
The following statement was issued today, July 20, 2015: The AAUP and AFT‐Wisconsin stand together in condemning the attacks on higher education that the Wisconsin Legislature included in its biennial budget, which Governor Walker signed into law last Monday. We call on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and the UW System and campus‐level…
Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an exceptionally perceptive essay by Christopher Newfield, professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, cosponsor of the Remaking the University website, and a member of the Academe magazine advisory board, calling for a new strategy in defense of tenure. Everyone should read it. “So…