Roth, Holly. The Content Assignment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. After a career as a fashion model, Holly Roth shifted to a writing career, contributing to newspapers and magazines and then working as an editor with periodicals ranging from Seventeen and Cosmopolitan to the American Journal of Surgery. His career as a novelist…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The push for doing education on the cheap has led to a number of “innovations” nearly always touted as ways to “do more with less.” But the data on these experiments increasingly present a more complicated picture of their…
Godwin’s Law says that online arguments devolve into comparisons with Hitler or Nazis. We can extend that, I think, to almost any American argument involving politics and include “fascist” in the list of comparables: A student at Clemson University in South Carolina, in order to bring attention to the university’s past involvement in racism, has…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor Phyllis Wise has written an open letter to the campus (copied below) explaining her decision not to allow the hiring of Steven Salaita. The letter is an appalling attack on academic freedom and a rejection of the basic values that a university must stand for. Wise argues, “What we…
In coordination with Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s letter defending the Steven Salaita firing, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees today issued a letter of support (pdf here, and copied below) endorsing her decision. Disturbing, the Board of Trustees declares “our collective and unwavering support of Chancellor Wise and her philosophy of academic freedom and free…
This week the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-leaning group founded by Lynne Cheney (aka Darth Vader’s wife) released a report endorsed by a group of twenty-three trustees, administrators, and a handful of largely conservative faculty from elite institutions, headed by Benno Schmidt, former President of Yale University and Chair of the…
The following is a link to an article I published about textbooks. I resolve to do something concrete about this problem, and one part of the solution will be abandoning the practice of using textbooks for certain courses. I hope others will follow and offer suggestions. I hope others may already be teaching without “required” textbooks. http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/22/the-trouble-with-textbooks-a-great-american-rip-off/
I don’t know anything about Lakeland Community College in Ohio, much less about the issues that may be provoking faculty there to go on strike (but I can guess they are similar to those faced by faculty everywhere). However, when I chanced across this inspiring post from this morning on the website of the Ohio…
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…