Now That We Have Transformed Our Institutions to Compete with the University of Phoenix, It’s on Life Support
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…
Step Aside, Deanlettes. The Provost Fellows Have Arrived.
The following news item has appeared in this week’s digital newsletter from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: “A Google search for the term ‘chief diversity officer’ delivers 5.6 million results. Many colleges and universities across the world have added an administrative post with the title of chief diversity officer in recent years. At…
ACRL Statement on Academic Freedom
The following statement was approved by the Board of Directors of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) during the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, June 2015. Librarians have a long history and practice of defending the free expression of ideas. The “Code of Ethics of American Library Association” (2008) states that…
Why Nelson Is Wrong about Salaita
Cary Nelson has an essay at InsideHigherEd today (along with Michael Rothberg) on the Salaita case. Here’s my comment on Nelson’s piece. First, I must note that absolutely nothing in Nelson’s essay is relevant to the actual reasons given by the chancellor and the trustees for firing Salaita. They have never questioned Salaita’s academic credentials,…
“Waiting” in the Neoliberal University: The Salaita Case and the Wages of an Academic Boycott
The following essay originally was published on the anthropology blog Savage Minds. By Martin F. Manalansan IV and Ellen Moodie* The crisis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has become known as “the Salaita case,” or just “Salaita.” In common parlance the surname refers not so much to the Palestinian American literary scholar…
The Popularity of College Football—and the Very Thin Line between the Cute and the Macabre
Writing for the Lansing State Journal, Judy Putnam reports that a taxidermist named Nick Saade (well, at least it’s not “de Sade”) has attempted to capture the passionate gridiron rivalry between the Michigan State Spartans and the Michigan Wolverines in a diorama featuring 22 stuffed chipmunks wearing tiny versions of the football helmets worn by…
How Access to College Educations Is Linked to the Decline in the Average Intelligence of Marine Corps’ Officers since the 1970s
A recently completed study by Michael Klein of the Brookings Institute and Michael Cancian of Tufts University, a veteran of recent U.S. military conflicts, explores the paradox that, since the inception of the all-volunteer force, the percentage of those with above-average intelligence who are serving in the military has dramatically increased while the percentage of…
From “Awfulizing” to Organizing
Yesterday I posted an entry about the AAUP Colorado Conference’s efforts to organize part-time community college faculty, who represent the overwhelming majority of community college teachers in that state. Central to these efforts has been the work of Caprice Lawless, President of the Front Range Community College AAUP Chapter and Vice-President for Community Colleges of…
The Kids Are All Right! Part III
Last September I posted a piece entitled “The Kids Are All Right!” in which I praised high school students in Jefferson County, Colorado, who staged mass walkouts to protest a plan by their right-wing school board to establish a curriculum-review committee to not only respond to an allegedly “leftist” AP framework but to promote patriotism,…