By Sharon Ann Musher In the aftermath of the board of trustees’ vote at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to terminate Steven Salaita’s conditional job offer, the scholar of Arab-American literature is pursuing two options. He has engaged the Center for Constitution Rights to sue the university. And he has requested that the American…
Moody’s issued a report last week pointing to a basic discrepancy in how we view college admissions that underscores the collapse of the college tuition-dependent finance model. In its report, Moody’s noted that applications to private colleges rose 70 percent from 2004 to last year but the annual total of new high school graduates rose…
The Chicago Tribune has updated the Steven Salaita whirlwind speaking tour in Chicago. Kindly see here. I noticed that a scheduled appearance at the University of Illinois at Chicago was canceled according to the paper. This is a link to another article in the Chicago Tribune that announces the tour and discusses the Salaita tenure travesty…
In an announcement that shocked even the last reader of Victoria’s Secret catalogs alive, Brian Kilmeade, Fox News announced that it is going to do a booty-reset, which entails the hiring of on-air personnel, particularly female ones, that are fat and ugly. “We are undergoing a paradigm shift,” a masked and invisible spokes-entity for Fox…
Let’s be blunt: There has never been anything behind “let the market do it” privatization schemes for education beyond a desire to tap into the stream of tax dollars going into education. If the people pushing for-profit colleges and charter schools really believed in the myths of the free market that they promote, they would not…
Rudy Fichtenbaum, President American Association of University Professors First I want to thank the University of Saskatchewan Faculty Association for inviting me to attend your Academic Freedom Event. I do not consider myself to be an expert on academic freedom. Thus, I am all the more so truly honored that you have asked me…
Rudy Fichtenbaum, President American Association of University Professors While cases such as the ones I have been discussing receive lots of public attention, they pale in comparison a number of other threats to academic freedom, mainly the attacks on public sector unions and growing use of faculty who are hired on contingent contracts. In the…
The other morning, I was reading on the 2 train on my way to school, reading a book on education issues that a publisher had sent me for review. The subway wasn’t crowded, maybe a dozen or so others in the car. One was a young woman who, I noticed, was eyeing me from across…
Here are the opening paragraphs of an article that appeared in yesterday’s Boston Globe: “The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced Monday that it will review aspects of a campus police department program that uses students as confidential drug informants, after a disclosure that an informant for the university police died of a heroin overdose. “The…
In the mid-1990s, Pearson, which, to that point, had been a media conglomerate, set out to become the world’s largest publisher of textbooks. Within a decade, it bought up most of the most recognizable imprints—and most of those that it didn’t buy up have been bought up by its major competitor, McGraw-Hill. In the early…