America’s colleges and universities define themselves partly by the company that they keep. As they seek to improve the quality of their institutions, most higher education officials look at some combination of inputs – including the number of applications, acceptances, and admissions – and outputs – persistence and graduation rates – to determine how much…
The following paragraphs are taken from the opening of an article by Katy Murphy that appeared in the May 12, 2014, edition of the San Jose Mercury News: “San Jose State’s embattled president has issued a public apology, vowing to ‘right the ship’ after a rocky year and widespread criticism led the statewide chancellor to…
AAUP members should receive their print copies of the May/June issue of Academe over the next few days. In the meantime, they can read it online–as can anyone else (there’s no paywall around here). If you only know us through the blog, you may find the magazine worth your while. More in depth and carefully prepared,…
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.…
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…
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…
Several days ago, I posted several pie charts showing student-loan debt as a percentage of total personal debt in 2003 and in 2013. Business Insider has represented the same federal data as a bar graph of the first- and third-quarter data from each year between 2003 and 2014. What this graph allows one to see is that…
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…
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…
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…