Last week, Erik Brady, Steve Berkowitz and Christopher Schnaars wrote about the growing money pressures faced by “non-power 5” college athletic programs in USA Today. They found that “by the NCAA’s benchmark for self-sufficiency, just 24 of the 230 public schools in Division I stand on their own, up from 20 a year earlier, “…
In 1928, Horatio Alger: A Biography Without a Hero by Herbert R. Mayes appeared. For over 40 years, it was the “go to” source for information about the iconic boys’ writer. Mayes parlayed the success of his book into an editing career crowned, in the sixties, with a term as president of McCall Corporation, publisher…
By Andrew Scheinman Two weeks ago I wrote a short post for academeblog.org discussing the facts I’d learned by filing Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on the Steven Salaita Affair, a post in which I also considered the follow-up investigations into that Affair by the UIUC Committee on Academic Freedom and…
It has been a while since I made the initial post in what I intended to become a series. These are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories: Back, with New Wrinkles [Title of an article on…
Testimony before the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education Presented by Grace Goodluck May 19th, 2015 Honorable Chairman Gardner and members of the committee, My name is Grace Goodluck, and I just completed my sophomore year at Kent State University. College was always presented to me as an inevitable part of my future–I was…
I have done a number of posts on Bobby Jindal’s political calculations and their impact on public higher education in Louisiana, and I am planning several more posts on the ongoing budget issues in the state. But I have just come across a news item that has left me scratching my head. But, first, here…
The federal data that is being 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…
Just as he is, in many ways, the godfather to the blogs, Benjamin Franklin’s spirit stands over the baptism of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Something new and different? No. As are all children, MOOCs were birthed out of a long line of ancestors. Franklin’s Junto and subsequent libraries, the Lyceum movement, New Thought…
Ahead of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Business Insider published this list of the twelve most difficult winning words in the history of the contest. No doubt, the selections have become somewhat arbitrary: that is, I am certain that there are some equally obscure and difficult alternatives available from other years. 2011: cymotrichous (adj.) — having…
Testimony before the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education Presented by Rachael Collyer May 19th, 2015 Honorable Chairman Gardner and members of the committee, My name is Rachael Collyer and I address you today both as a student with a personal stake in the issue and also as an educational justice organizer with the…