Legislative and Media Response to Ohio Chancellor’s Testimony on Ohio Higher Ed Appropriations

The following are two brief excerpts from Gongwer’s coverage of the Chancellor’s testimony and the legislators’ response to it. Gongwer is a subscription news service on Ohio government; so I cannot provide a link to the entire article. _________________________ “Chancellor Defends Governor’s Plan To Cut College Costs “A House subcommittee budget probed the higher education…

Media Response to Ohio Conference Report and Testimony on Ohio Higher Ed Appropriations

John McNay’s testimony was listed first in University Business’s daily overview of the most notable higher-ed news stories of the previous day The UB Daily item links to an article by Karen Farkus in the C leveland Plain Dealer. Here are the opening paragraphs in that article: “COLUMBUS, Ohio – College professors are taking a…

Ohio Conference of AAUP Produces Higher Ed Report

The Ohio Conference AAUP has produced an “Ohio Higher Education Report” entitled The Real Problems Deserve Real Solutions. The purpose of the report is to influence public policy around higher education issues, especially in light of HB 64, the state budget bill, as well as Gov. Kasich’s Task Force on Affordability and Efficiency. It is also a response…

"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"

Badges? Certification? Can these replace college? Or is this a false binary? The problem, I think, is that we no longer know what “college” means and end up conflating differing entitites. Or, maybe we simply have conflicting ideas of “college.” One vision of “college” centers on a Deweyesque vision of education as concerning the person.…

This Is a Joke Only in the Existential Sense

That is, this is a joke only in the sense that “this is how the world ends” might provoke laughter as the last defense against the overwhelming sense of the absurdity of existence in the face of its end. What follows is the daily column written by Joseph (Yussef) Farrah for World Net Daily, a…

Making the Case for the Penalties to Syracuse’s Intercollegiate Athletics Programs and Making the Case That They Are Unfair

There does not seem to be much disagreement about what has occurred over the last decade to decade and a half in the intercollegiate athletics program at Syracuse University. But there are very significant disagreements between the NCAA and the university administration about what is responsible and about what punishments are appropriate. I think that…

Ohio Conference President Provides Senate Testimony on the Decline in State Support, Administrate Bloat, the Cost of Intercollegiate Athletics, and Faculty Workload

Testimony of John T. McNay, Ph.D., President Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, Before the Ohio Senate Finance Committee, Senator Scott Oelslager, Chair, March 3, 2015   Chairman Oelslager, Ranking Member Skindell, and distinguished members of the Finance Committee: my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio Conference…

Cornel West Cancels Thulin Lecture in Protest of Salaita Firing

The Center for Constitutional Rights is reporting that Cornel West is boycotting, in solidarity protest, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the firing of tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita for extramural utterances on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last year: Dr. Cornel West Joins Boycott of Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over Salaita Firing March 4, 2015, New York – Esteemed…

Proposed Closure of South Carolina State University

The AAUP today sent a letter to South Carolina legislators urging them to reject a panel’s proposal to close South Carolina State University (SCSU), which was founded in 1896, and is the state’s only publicly funded historically Black university. The letter notes that historically black institutions (HBIs) like SCSU came into being as a result…