By Sonya Huber, Fairfield University [We came across this great posting on Sonya’s personal blog, http://sonyahuber.com/, and received permission from the author to share it.] I am an Associate Professor at Fairfield University, where I teach composition and creative writing in the English Department. As my fifteenth year of teaching in higher ed begins, I have…
In an article published in Money [http://time.com/money/3145086/corinthian-colleges-university-bankrupt-financial-trouble/], Matt Krupnick, who writes for the Hechinger Report, highlights “Five Signs Your College Is in Serious Financial Trouble.” Krupnick has clearly written the article in response to the well-publicized issues facing Corinthian College and the City College of San Francisco, though neither of those institutions’ problems are really…
Proffitt, Nicholas. The Embassy House. New York: Bantam, 1986. For more than a decade, Nicholas Proffitt served as a correspondent and a bureau chief for Newsweek in many locations around the globe, including “hot spots” such as Saigon and Beirut. He has won awards for his reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict and on the…
The following letter by Michael Rothberg originally appeared on his website. Rothberg is the Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in…
The University of Alaska (UA) faces a $26M budget deficit. Jobs have been cut, departments are being downsized, and departing faculty are being replaced by adjuncts who earn poverty wages and receive no benefits. Student services have been slashed while student fees have increased. Public Radio programming has been axed, as has the University of…
On August 10, the Chicago Tribune has published an editorial titled “How Purdue Is Re-Inventing the American University.” No author is identified. The article title is both misleading and hyperbolic. It is misleading because it focuses entirely on Mitch Daniels and not on any broader initiatives within the university. It is hyperbolic because it does not…
By Nicholas Burbules, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I want to thank Mr. Wilson for sending us his posting on “Shared Governance and the Salaita Case” and inviting us to respond. Joyce Tolliver and I do call for an honest debate in our editorial. We fully accept that there are serious, principled positions on different…
This summer I am teaching online, in part because many students prefer to take classes online. Summer is the time for mischief, experimentation and creation—there is just something about that added sunlight, all sorts of plants I know not the names of in bloom everywhere—it just makes you want to try something new. In my…
William Deresiewicz’s new book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life is being published today by Free Press. You can read an excerpt from it at the New Republic, along with a critique I wrote as part of a symposium for Minding the Campus. I interviewed him via email about his…
Part I of this series on first-generation students looked at the value of talking about social class in reducing the achievement gap compared to continuing-generation students. This week’s post will look at how the cultural fit between first-generation students and colleges and universities can impact student success. “Unseen Disadvantage: How American Universities’ Focus on Independence…