Last week, a group convened by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report examining the role of trustees in college and university governance. The report, titled “Governance for a New Era: A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees,” suggested the trustees should take a more active role by establishing definable institutional metrics, promoting…
Inside Higher Ed has a lengthy story about the University of Illinois administration’s justifications for firing Steven Salaita. What’s really important about today’s story is this revelation that the top fundraising official at the University of Illinois Foundation had emailed Chancellor Phyllis Wise and other top U of I fundraisers, telling her “Dan, Molly, and…
In a major victory for faculty and staff and for reproductive rights more generally, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has reversed a previous decision to allow two Catholic universities to eliminate coverage of most abortions for employees, declaring that state law requires health insurance plans to cover all abortions. The state had previously…
Someone has disseminated what purports to be a portion of a presentation on Google’s progress in developing “Google Science,” an open-source platform for the publication of scientific papers that might radically transform not just the way in which the results of scientific research are disseminated but also the ways in which scientific research is conducted.…
Colorado CO S 114 2014 State University Global Campus Student Access Status: Enacted – Act No. 144 Date of Last Action:* 05/02/2014 – Enacted Author: Todd (D) Topics: Postsecondary, Postsecondary-Community and Junior Colleges, Distance/online/virtual learning Summary: Amends the role and mission of Colorado State University global – campus on-line university to permit baccalaureate degree programs instead of upper-division baccalaureate completion…
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…