It Was Never an Either/Or Choice, but Was the Mutilation of the Stacks Worse than the Abandonment of the Stacks?

This item originally appeared at Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com).  It is being re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains that site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. _________________________ Most mutilated journals in the library of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, September 1982-May 1983: 1. Personnel Psychology 2.…

David Remnick’s Commencement Address at Syracuse University: A Progressive Call to Action

The following transcript of David Remnick’s commencement address is reprinted here with the permission of the Syracuse University communications office. The video is available at: http://news.syr.edu/video-david-remnicks-commencement-address-15306/ Remnick is the editor of the New Yorker. So one would expect his commencement address to be witty and insightful. But the speech attrached some controversy because Remnick chose…

"We Are All Crap Artists Now"

The last line of Philip K. Dick’s underappreciated novel Confessions of a Crap Artist is probably one the best warnings to all of us who think we know something: And on the basis of past choices, it seems pretty evident that my judgment is not of the best. The reports, this past week, that the…

College Administrators Simply Should Not Be Investigating Criminal Complaints: How They Are Doing It Is Not the Problem; That They Are Doing It Is the Problem

These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Teresa Watanabe for the Los Angeles Times; the title of the article is “College Administrators Learning to Be Sexual Misconduct Detectives”: “Butte College administrator Al Renville was never trained as a police investigator, but that’s close to the job he found himself in when two…

ONLINE EDUCATION–ALL TOO CONVENIENT, LIKE FAST FOOD

I remember how shocked I was upon finding out that some students were taking all of their classes online–while living in the dorms. Then I was dismayed, too, that the source I learned this absurd behavior from did not even try to pull a Captain Renault out of Casablanca and say, “I’m shocked, shocked to find…

Low-Wage Workers Have No Where Left to Go but into the Streets

Fast food has become a global industry, and now the labor unrest in that industry has gone global. Businessweek has provided a fairly thorough overview of the scope of the protests that occurred yesterday in 33 nations: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-15/scenes-from-the-fast-food-worker-protests-spreading-overseas Robert Reich has provided a succinct statement of why these workers deserve broad support: http://fastfoodglobal.org/main/why-support-the-fast-food-strikes/ And the advocacy site Low…

Reactions to Kansas Social Media Policy

If you’ve been following the news, you know that the Kansas board of regents on Wednesday adopted a social media policy that allows faculty and other to be punished for a broad and vaguely defined range of expressions, including any that are “contrary to the best interests of the employer” or “impairs . . .…

From the New Faculty Majority: Homeless Adjunct Activist Launches Five-Day Hunger Strike to Draw Attention to College Faculty Poverty

Action Follows March Protest at NY State Department of Education, Letter Ignored by Governor Cuomo Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an adjunct professorof Spanish and Italian who made national news by protesting her poverty-level conditions while teaching at two New York colleges, made an emergency room visit to Winthrop-University Hospital today after holding a five-day hunger strike on…