Ignatius, David Reynolds. Agents of Innocence. New York: Norton, 1987. David Reynolds Ignatius is a journalist who has reported for the Wall Street Journal on subjects ranging from the challenges facing the U.S. steel industry to the corrosive conflicts in the Middle East, to the clandestine activities of the C.I.A. He has subsequently worked as…
Seeing the Department of Education’s Tweet of “Help Me. I’m Poor” with a picture of Kristen Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids memorably shnookered at first made me think yes, she is poor because she is saddled by student loan debts. But then I thought about an all-too-common occurrence these days. Increasingly kids are going to college…
To provide some context for appreciating the statistics related to the largest private employers in the U.S., let’s begin with the two largest public employers in the country. Those two employers are the Department of Defense, which with 3.2 million employees is the largest employer in the world, and the U.S. Postal Service, which with…
In the continuing standoff between faculty, staff, and students at City College of San Francisco, supported by broad community forces and prominent political leaders, and the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges (ACCJC; see my most recent posts here and here; see also my original post of July 8 and subsequent posts on July…
I often return to the quote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” by William Butler Yeats, which I first became aware of through his Irish countryman and fellow poet and Nobel Prize recipient, Seamus Heaney. I don’t take this utterance to mean that what we…
Past president of the AAUP and continuing activist Cary Nelson contributes to the current “Room for Debate” feature in The New York Times, “Lofty Salaries in the Ivory Towers.” He writes: When a college or university president has an annual salary 50 times what some faculty and staff earn, the institution delivers a powerful message about…
Making news this past May was the release of employee diversity information at large tech firms, including Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo, which indicated, not that surprisingly, that these Silicon Valley companies employed primarily men (60-70%). The news was more discouraging when the data was disaggregated into tech-related and leadership positions, with the percentage of women…
It’s been interesting to watch the great debate unfold as the federal government intervenes to provide students and their families with a more rational sense of the “fit” between college applicants and colleges and universities. Enter the “College Scorecard” whose principal data points include average net price, loan default rate, six-year graduation rate, median borrowing…
One of the most frustrating things about higher education (and the business world, too) is how failed CEOs get golden parachutes. At my institution, Illinois State University, everybody is still fuming that former president Tim Flanagan received a $480,000 golden parachute for being fired after a few months on the job. Although the trustees could…