By Dean Murakami, President, Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) The following remarks were delivered at the opening general session of the FACCC Advocacy and Policy Conference in Sacramento, California on March 2, 2014. California is finally coming out of the horrible recession where our state legislators cut the funding for community colleges…
On March 2-3, the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges (FACCC) held its annual advocacy and policy conference in Sacramento around the theme of “Changing the Narrative on California Community Colleges.” The conference included a full day and morning of discussions and panels and an afternoon of direct lobbying of legislators. The opening session…
Two years ago, I delivered a paper at the Modern Language Society annual meeting on blind peer review. I don’t much care for it, I said. Though I am uncomfortable with peer review as a whole, it was the “blind” part I was addressing particularly. Perhaps I was too timid. Perhaps it takes a Nobel…
American educational institutions are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot. Not only are we often abusing students financially (see my earlier post referring to Suzanne Mettler’s work), but we are allowing corporate ideas (ones that are demolishing the stability of the American economy by squeezing the American workforce–as Barbara Garson, among others,…
Suzanne Mettler’s The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy was quite useful to me when writing The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. She’s onto something, arguing (to quote from my book) that the: startling unwillingness to recognize the support we have received over our lives has had the surprising…
This past week, the Healthcare Interprofessional Education of Pioneer Valley collaborative, composed of administrators and faculty in healthcare and health sciences disciplines from colleges and universities in the greater Springfield, MA area, held an open development program to help “Raise Your IPE IQ” for faculty involved in educating students (nursing, pharmacy, physical and occupational therapy,…
One impact of the great recession has been resurgence in demand by cities and towns that colleges and universities pay a greater portion of the region’s tax bill. Municipal authorities make valid arguments to support these demands. They point to the percentage of taxable land taken off the tax rolls by higher education institutions. They…
Asked to explain his opposition to extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed, Texas Congressman Pete Sessions asserted: “I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployments [sic] to people rather than us working on creation of jobs. A job is the most important attribute, I believe, in…
In several instances in the recent past, mentally disturbed individuals in China have gone of rampages that have left more than one person dead and a larger number wounded. In all of these instances, these individuals have been armed not with guns but with knives–or, in one instance, an ax–and the toll in human lives…
In American political discourse, there is a failure to distinguish between persuasion and argument that extends to the media coverage of politics and that distorts, sometimes grossly, the public understanding of and response to the issues of the day. Any student in a composition course that covers persuasion and argument learns that argument is a…