In most four-year college strategic plans, there is a good-faith statement calling for increasing diversity as an institutional goal. There are good – even noble – reasons for doing so. The principal one is that American colleges and universities must look more like the rest of America if they are to remain relevant in the…
I spoke on a podcast, This Week at InsideHigherEd, about the Salaita case, along with former Barnard president Judith Shapiro, who argued that the Salaita case indicated the need for more shared governance. I would argue that the Salaita case is a good reason to understand what shared governance really means. Shared governance doesn’t mean that…
The New York Post recently ran a story by Carl Campanile under this headline: “College Liberals Spurn $10M Gift from the Koch Brothers.” Mitchell Langbert, a faculty member in the Business School at Brooklyn College, had been in extended discussions with the Koch Brothers Foundation about establishing a “financial center” within the Business School. When…
Donald Lazere’s new book is Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias. I interviewed him via email about his book. JW: Your book’s title is provocative, but is it true? Do you really believe that higher education should have a leftist bias? Your pedagogical model is Gerald Graff’s Teach the Conflicts, and you are…
Since his death, it has become clear that, in contrast to his very extroverted stage persona, Robin Williams very quietly did an uncountable number of good things throughout his life. Among the many good causes that he supported, he literally stood up for collective bargaining rights. The following photos show him walking the picket line…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The staggering level of college loan debt in our country finally seems to be getting some long-overdue national attention. Among the proposals for how to deal with this issue is one called “Pay It Forward,” a program that would substitute…
Phillips, David Atlee. The Carlos Contract. New York: Macmillan, 1978. David Atlee Phillips served with the C.I.A. for a quarter of a century, from 1950 to 1975. From 1973 to 1975, he was head of the agency’s Western Hemisphere Division. In 1977, his memoir, The Night Watch: Twenty-Five Years of Peculiar Service, was published. Meant…
Readers of this blog who have been following developments in the case of Professor Steven Salaita, whose appointment to a tenured position at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana was revoked, apparently in response to his controversial Twitter postings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, may find a recent analysis of the case by Michael C. Dorf, Robert…
I receive the daily newsletter from the Jerusalem Post, and several days ago, I also received this e-mail: At first, I thought that the e-mail must be a hoax, a parody, but as far as I am able to tell, it seems to be a legitimate advertisement. Before going any further, I’d like to…
The focus on the disparity between the administrative and instructional staffing and compensation is becoming more local. These are the opening paragraphs of the third article in a four-article series in the Norman Transcript comparing the credentials and the compensation of administrators and faculty at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma: “In today’s competitive workforce, the…