One day in October of 2011, I went down to Zuccotti Park to listen to what the Occupy Wall Street people were saying about education. They had a circle going, moderated by a couple of people from Columbia Teachers College and a member of the NYC City Council was handing out his card. It was…
Last month a bill was introduced in the Idaho legislature to allow guns to be carried on campuses in the state, though they would not be permitted in certain campus buildings or at certain campus events. The Idaho Statesman published an editorial, endorsed by its entire editorial board, opposing the legislation. The following two paragraphs…
I’ve been meaning to visit here and tell the story of the difficult situation at my university, Colorado State University – Pueblo, for some time now, but I waited until now so that my story has a moral. You may have read about the problems that my friend Tim McGettigan has been having with his…
Matthew Abraham’s new book, Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine, examines intellectual freedom and the Israel-Palestine debate in America. Illinois Academe editor John K. Wilson conducted this interview via email with Abraham, who has served on the Illinois AAUP Council and the Illinois AAUP’s Committee A.
The following is from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE). The CFHE website can be found at: http://futureofhighered.org/. _________________________ Earlier this year, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education released a working paper, “Making All Public Higher Education Free.” In that paper the author, Bob Samuels, demonstrated why such a proposal is…
Many pixels have already been devoted to discussing the case of W, the philosophy job candidate who says her job offer was rescinded after she inquired with the department making the offer about what adjustments in start-date, salary, new teaching preps per year, pre-tenure sabbatical, and maternity leave might be possible. Rather than indicating which…
Taylorism, the systematization of labor developed by Frederick Taylor, makes the worker immediately replaceable. Individual skill and knowledge becomes irrelevant–on the part of the worker. Only at the higher levels of management and ownership does creativity count for anything. It’s an elitist system positing that those at the lower echelons are merely cogs, not thinkers.…
When the ACA provision that allowed the uninsured to receive insurance from government coordinated exchanges finally was on the verge of going into effect, the conservative think-tank FreedomWorks initiated a civil-disobedience campaign, of sorts. They tried to enlist masses of young people to reject the inexpensive and often government-subsidized insurance now available to them. But…
Several days ago, in an article for Salon, Lindsay Abrams reported that the state of Wyoming rejected the Next Generation Science Standards being implemented nationwide as part of the effort to increase student interest and achievement in the STEM disciplines. As has been the case whenever and wherever these science standards have been challenged, one…