Rep. Alan Grayson is well known as a progressive advocate in Congress, and a strong supporter of civil liberties. That makes the bill he just proposed even more appalling. On May 30, 2014, the very same day that Grayson passed an important amendment banning funding for prosecuting journalists for refusing to reveal their sources, Grayson introduced H.R. 4776, “To prohibit…
This is not so much in response to Mary Flanagan’s essay, “The Classroom as Arcade,” recently published by Inside Higher Ed, which features a vivid observation of a student in class who “check[ed] out from a class he likes” to play a role-playing game on an electronic device while others “openly engaged with their Facebook pages,”…
This is the time of the year when gymnasiums and lawns all over the country fill with graduates barely able to sit still during ceremonies before they will be set free to go on to do what they want or must in the next phase of their life. This is also a time when faculty…
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently issued a new report on disinvitations, which claims that conservatives are almost three times as likely as those on the left to encounter attempts at disinvitation of a campus speaker since 2000 based on an analysis of 192 incidents. Trying to document all the disinvitation attempts…
Clayton Christensen, the opening keynote speaker at the fourth annual Harvard IT Summit, talked about the ways online learning is transforming higher education. Christensen, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS), asked and answered a question specifically about HBS, but that can be asked by any college or university,…
Today’s Inside Higher Ed prominently features an article about faculty complaining about The Vagina Monologues being in part performed at a year’s end celebration ceremony coinciding with commencement at Mercer County Community College. Surely this news is a kick in the pants that we need to consider what really constitutes acceptable ceremonial material. Having alumni…
An article with the attention-grabbing headline of “Home Depot, The Place to Go for Toilet Paper?” in Friday’s issue of The Wall Street Journal made some interesting points about how to drive consumer traffic. Yes, I do not like to use that term either or to apply it to higher education, but that seems to be where…
That’s me in my store a decade or so ago, talking to a sales rep while browsing a catalog. The store was called “Shakespeare’s Sister.” At the time this was taken, I had closed the cafe in the back, expanding instead our art and sitting space, “The Artback.” My former partners and I had named…
On the evening of Monday, May 5, the deans at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut received an email informing them of a staffing meeting the next day. At that meeting, the deans of certain schools were told that they had a grand total of two days–during final exam week–to consult with department chairs and determine which 16 full-time faculty would be…