There are big changes coming in American higher education. College and university governance must accommodate these changes and shape rather than be shaped by them. The changes reflect both the simple reality that the financing structure doesn’t work and that external forces will impose new challenges and opportunities upon senior leadership. What steps can college…
Between 2008 and 2014, state support for higher education has decreased 30.7% in Pennsylvania, the 11th highest decrease among the states. The decrease has amounted to $2,206 per full-time-equivalent student. In 2014, while 42 of the 50 states have increased allocations for higher education, Pennsylvania has been one of eight states in which state funding…
Kilgore College is a community college in rural East Texas. For most of its history, the college has been recognized, if at all, for one of three things. First, it is now the site of the East Texas Oil Museum. Kilgore had been incorporated in the early 1870s, and for the first half-century of its…
This brief post is from Diane Ravitch’s blog: “Let us give thanks for family, friends, and the right to speak freely. There is so much potential for good in our country, and we must all do our best to allow that potential to become reality. We must never back down from those who are imperious,…
The data analytics staff at Facebook has produced the following map indicating what people are most thankful for by state: One cannot help but notice the range in focus, from religious beliefs to emotional sentiments, from Internet sites to genres of music, and from geographical features to seasonal weather. The survey responses have also…
My colleague, California State University, East Bay English Professor Susan Gubernat, has published a terrific piece in the Sacramento Bee that should go viral. Read it here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article4126796.html
This is a guest post from Karen Craigo, a non-tenure-track professor at Drury University. Just the other day, professor Craigo found out that her three-year contract was not renewed. She wrote a poem in response to her situation. To get the sack is to lose your job. We might also say canned, fired, given the boot.…
The Community College Research Center at the Columbia University Teachers College has released a report on “Unintended Impacts of Performance Funding on Community Colleges and Universities in Three States.” The full text of this CCRC Working Paper No. 78 is available at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/unintended-impacts-performance-funding.pdf. The report’s authors are Hana Lahr, Lara Pheatt, Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya…
In an exasperating article on the op-ed page of The New York Times today, science writer Benedict Carey argues for the benefit of testing, conflating all types from yearly standardized tests to weekly quizzes and ignoring the indisputable fact that tests are primarily regressive (they test what is known, sometimes at the expense of what might…
Huffaker, Clair. Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian. New York: McKay, 1967. When Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian was published in 1967, Huffaker had already established himself as a novelist and screenwriter who could remain fundamentally true to the Western formula while cleverly manipulating some of its elements to give each story a winning combination…