Money, the goal of all goals, today is ruining both education and government. When money becomes, as it has, our only measure of value, structures protecting anything else melt before it. As the “business model” is most keenly attuned to profit, it has become the one model for all of our endeavors. In my first “real” job out…
In the mid-1990s, a group of chief financial officers from Boston-area colleges joined together to form the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, or TBC for short. It quickly grew beyond the financial realm as local schools realized the gains that could be made from working together on common problems. In the new issue of Academe,…
Before 1915, AAUP founders Arthur Lovejoy and James McKeen Cattell stressed the need for significant reform of the traditional mode of governance prevalent in US higher education. Both proposed to have the president be elected by the faculty and to reduce the power of governing boards. Lovejoy proposed that reforming governance be the main focus of the soon-to-be-founded Association, because it would…
Seizing a Sculpture “At Canada’s Capilano University, the administration confiscates a professor’s work caricaturing the president on the grounds that it constitutes ‘harassment.’” –INSIDE HIGHER ED I must say the Poodle is looking very presidential. The extended touch of gray shows someone who has had his share of worries, and the sharp, long tooth making…
Dear Students and Fellow Artists, Recently, nine of your murals at Central CT State University were ordered destroyed by CCSU President Jack Miller. Nine more are on the immediate chopping block. Miller and Chief Administrative Officer Richard Bachoo waited until classes had ended for the semester – then, without informing the artists, faculty or the…
The rise of online courses—massive and open or just regularly-sized—is one of the major trends in higher education over the last few years. Of course, the rapidly growing access to high speed Internet has been crucial in helping online education spread, but as Julie Vargas explains in the new issue of Academe, today’s online courses…
Campbellsville University, located in Campbellsville in central Kentucky, is a Christian institution founded in 1906. It currently has an enrollment of about 3,200 students. That enrollment includes students attending two satellite campuses, in Louisville and Hodgenville, as well as students enrolled entirely in online programs. Campbellsville has partnered with The Learning House, Inc., to offer…
Ulf Kirchdorfer’s post yesterday made me laugh out loud. But, as funny as his observations about persistently dismal writing are, that sort of writing itself is just terribly disheartening, especially when one is confronted with document after document that seem to suggest that it has become something close to pervasive. If I have a choice…
Testimony of John McNay, President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, on House Bill 484, before the Ohio State Senate Finance Committee, on May 13, 2014 Chairman Oelslager, Ranking Member Sawyer, and distinguished members of the Senate Finance Committee: my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio Conference of the American…
I am writing this at the end of a work day, as if clearly-defined borders could be drawn between working and not working. For some time now I have hesitated to write about this topic, but I think it essential we begin a dialogue about it and also come up with some solutions to the…