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…
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…