Here are two items related to Labor Day that I thought might be of interest. The first article is from Diane Ravitch’s blog and titled “Labor Day 2014.” Here is the opening of that post: “I recently saw photographs of John F. Kennedy giving a Labor Day speech in New York City during his…
Richard Vedder, an emeritus economist at Ohio University, has recently released another study showing the benefits of “right to work” legislation. In a newspaper interview, he has predicted that Ohio will adopt “right to work” legislation in 2015. Vedder has, of course, long been on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute; so, despite his…
In late July, Kris Olds wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed’s Blog U: Global Higher Ed titled “Why No MOOCs on Gaza?” [The complete article is available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/why-no-moocs-gaza] Rightly recognizing that the MOOC format would be perfectly suited to providing succinct overviews of the conflicts in the world’s hotspots, Olds searched sites of…
You may have missed this item published by Inside Higher Ed in late July. Written by Colleen Flaherty, the article confirms Aaron Barlow’s earlier post to this blog that bias against hillbillies may be one of the last widely accepted and largely unchallenged biases in this country. Here are the first two paragraphs of Flaherty’s…
The Oakland College Has Been Very Progressive on the Rights of Transgender Students but Not on Collective-Bargaining Rights or Adjunct-Faculty Rights In a very recent post, I commented on Mills College’s becoming the first single-gender institution to admit transgender students [https://academeblog.org/2014/08/26/mills-college-becomes-the-first-single-gender-college-to-admit-transgender-students/]. The college’s progressivism on that issue, however, seems to stand in fairly stark…
Here’s what Christopher Kennedy, chair of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, told the Chicago Tribune in an article in today’s newspaper: “We create an environment appropriate for students to learn in,” Kennedy said. “In the few instances where the board has been brought into decisions regarding faculty, our position has been really consistent…
California Governor Gerry Brown has appealed a state judge’s horrendous ruling that threw out teacher job protection laws on the ground that they deprived students of their constitutional rights. In a one-page appeal filed yesterday, Brown and California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris argued that a decision of such breadth should be made by a…
In a recent article in Inside Higher Ed, I closed with, “Is there room for cursive writing as we now begin the academic year in the not-so-hallowed halls of academe across America? Sure, but along with this kind of circus-act writing there is room, even more so, for the two-thumb essay.” Thinking about students writing…
If you want to engage your students in a thoughtful debate about public discourse in the age of Facebook and Twitter, you can of course use the ten or twelve excellent posts that John K. Wilson, Hank Reichman, Michael Berube, and others have made to this blog on the Steven Salaita case. If you would like…
On August 27, the Denver Business Journal ran an article on proposed legislation that will dramatically overhaul the application for federal student aid. The article opens with the following two paragraphs: “Several Colorado universities are getting behind a recent bipartisan bill zeroing in on speeding up the financial aid application process. “The bill—proposed by Sens.…