The Illinois State Senate’s Democratic Caucus has released a report on administrative bloat in the state’s colleges and universities. Although much of the focus is on executive compensation and expensive perks, there are many acknowledgements that the issues with executive compensation are indicative of proportionately high compensation throughout the administrative hierarchies of our institutions and…
Tidyman, Ernest. High Plains Drifter. New York: Bantam, 1973. An award-winning screenwriter, Ernest Tidyman won an Academy Award, and Edgar Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay of The French Connection. He also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the series of novels that he wrote about the…
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…
This is a guest post from an instructor at Louisiana Tech, who writes anonymously for fear of retribution. I see so many of my colleagues suffering, mostly in silence because what else can they do? They fear losing their job every day as it is. Their stories are painful to hear—increasing debt, depending upon parents to…
The May–June issue of Academe starts out with Clark G. Ross’s discussion of tenure. We think we all know what the concept of “tenure” means, but, in light of recent challenges to tenure, we need to make sure that we do. Ross begins his article by taking a look back at the historical origins of…
In what passes for “business” these days, institutions of any sort become potential cash cows for those at the top, structures allowing extraction of wealth while providing a minimum in return. Until, say, twenty years ago, educational entities were somewhat exempt, operating on a slightly different paradigm. Their mission was not to enrich those at the…
In a news story about the move by the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina System toward deleting 46 degree programs, Steven Long, one of the members of the Board, is quoted as saying, “We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the…
This is what Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley said on the Senate floor on the proposed TransPacific Partnership: “We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages, and think about the difference between running an operation in Malaysia or Mexico, with a…
So how will the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP, impact higher education? The truth is that the details of the trade deal have been shrouded in such secrecy that we simply don’t know. But if you would like to get some idea of what might be involved, you should take a look at a series…
The Conversation is an Australian website that seeks to synthesize academic and journalistic inquiry in order to provide very thoughtful commentary of Australian and international issues. Its mission statement includes the following principles: to inform public debate with knowledge-based journalism that is responsible, ethical and supported by evidence; to unlock the knowledge of researchers and academics to…