Northwestern University has already indicated that it plans to appeal this decision, and it may very well be overturned on appeal. But the arguments presented by the NLRB regional director who has communicated the decision are very thought-provoking. I have removed the footnotes because I think that the decision is more than long enough without…
In a big victory for labor rights (and student rights), the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Northwestern athletes are eligible to form a union and called for a secret ballot election. Northwestern University spokesperson Alan K. Cubbage said the university would appeal the decision and declared: “Northwestern believes strongly that our student-athletes are…
My ready illustration of talking heads with very little to say has long been the reporting in the immediate aftermath of the Challenger disaster. The nightly news anchors were on the air throughout most of that afternoon and evening, and each of them was provided with a rather large plastic model of the space shuttle,…
Guest Blogger Douglas Boyd is a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. The 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” (adopted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) (http://www.aaup.org/report/), the Association of Governing Boards of Universities (AGBU), the American Council…
In preparing to be a guest lecturer in an Introduction to Bioethics class, I have been reviewing information on the Human Genome Project (HGP), the project that many have called medicine and biology’s first example of “Big Science”. Todd Taylor, a noted bioinformatician at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan, when reminiscing about the…
An article published yesterday by Portside in Portland, Maine, opens: “Faculty and students launched an occupation of a Maine university building Friday to demand a halt to mass faculty layoffs and department slashes that they say are part of the austerity cuts devastating public education nation-wide. “Over 100 people launched a late-morning occupation of the…
In some respects, but especially in terms of its higher-ed dimensions, the Russian invasion of Crimea seems to echo the American invasion of Grenada. Those readers who were old enough to be following the news in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, will remember the U.S. invasion of that small Caribbean island with a…
Guest Blogger Beth Evans is an Associate Professor of Library Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Whether you believe that a library on your campus supports learning and research through print and electronic collections, or that the information literacy skills learned through research are integral to a college education, your…
For several months, there was much political debate about the extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. Predictably, people on the Far Right, from Rand Paul to Paul Ryan, asserted that the extension of benefits would amount to a disservice to those receiving the benefits. The reasons ranged from the broadly ideological—for instance, that…
Since the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were introduced, The New York Times has been in constant, clamorous support. Columnists as diverse as Paul Krugman and David Brooks have lauded them; new stories have assumed their obvious utility and necessity. Today, however, that started to change. Columnist Timothy Egan wrote this: The push for Common Core standards…