This Post from WordPress Is Hilarious in the Same Way That MOOCs and Badges and All of the Other Bullshit Is Hilarious—Because It Is Now All So Very, Very Plausible

Here at WordPress.com, we‘re always looking for ways to improve the blogging experience. We pride ourselves on taking your suggestions to heart and work tirelessly to create better tools for you. Today, we’re releasing a game changer. As WordPress.com becomes easier to use, one piece of unanswered feedback keeps nagging at us: blogging is hard!…

Notions of Privilege and Basic American Values

Aaron Barlow’s post today concerns legislation proposed in North Carolina that will uniformly increase teaching loads at all public universities to four courses per semester. I might look at this kind of legislation somewhat differently if the Far Right was interested in funding public higher education at any reasonable level and some legislators were, in…

Teach or Perish

If the dateline on this story had been a day later, I would not believe it (hat tip to Diane Ravitch for linking to it): “Bill would require all UNC professors to teach heavy course load.” Apparently, a state senator named Tom McInnis from Richmond, NC has introduced a bill to that effect: “There is no…

April Fools Day, in a Classroom

What I am about to recount did not occur on April Fool’s Day, but the story is in that vein. When I was in graduate school, another graduate teaching fellow asked me to participate in a hoax. In her freshman composition class, the assigned readings were the script of Orson Welles’s infamous radio dramatization of…

April Fools Day, with the Library of Congress and with Dr. Swift

For April Fools Day, the Library of Congress has provided materials related to the following hoax to educators who wish to make use of their digital collections of primary sources: “April Fools Day pranks are usually fairly short term: An entire class simultaneously falls asleep or a teacher assigns a forty-page essay due the next…

Steven Salaita Resists University of Illinois Effort to Dismiss Civil Rights Lawsuit

Tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita, last night, filed a response to the University of Illinois motion to dismiss his civil rights lawsuit against the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois officials and donors. The response lays out the underlying constitutional, contractual and tort-based claims at the heart of the lawsuit and addresses how the complaint alleges…

The Presumption of the Technocrats, Redux

In a review titled “The End of College? Not So Fast,” published by the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, Donald E. Heller provides a very thoughtful and substantive critique of Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. You may recall that I discussed Blaine Grateman’s review…

Mike Pence Seems to Believe That the Real Intolerance Is Not Being Willing to Tolerate Someone Else’s Righteous Intolerance

All day the talking heads on cable news have been debating whether the new Indiana law protecting “religious freedom” is actually a bill sanctioning biased treatment of LGBT individuals. A number Far-Right mouthpieces have tried to mount a defense of the law and of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whose inability either to provide any coherent…

Choosing the Right Path to College

While the notification date to college applicants varies dramatically depending upon the path selected for admission consideration, the notifications will largely be complete by April 1, even at the most selective schools. It’s at this point that the ball shifts to the applicant’s court. Until the notification, most of the applicant’s time, and corresponding anxieties,…