The latest book from Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, Big Bang Disruption, published in January by Portfolio/Penguin, outlines how the risks associated with Clayton Christensen’s theory on disruptive innovation have intensified due to the effects of the internet and rapid technological change. Instead of established industries having years to respond, or at least trying to…
If American higher education is going to continue to aspire to excellence, its institutions need to address and reverse the growing reliance on adjuncts as teachers. Not only is this exploitative of the adjuncts (to say nothing of the students), but it reduces our colleges and universities to factories, effectively excluding academic freedom and removing…
In 2012, the National Science Foundation conducted a public survey on basic knowledge of science, but the results were just released. The survey tracked the answers provided by 2,200 randomly selected adults to ten true-or false questions. The item that has attracted the most media attention has been the stunning revelation that 26% of the…
Today, in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof presents a column headlined “Professors, We Need You!” He wonders what has happened to those of us in academia, ending with these words: I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves…
At the end of December, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Steve Herbert titled “Colleges Trim Staffing Bloat.” So, if you did not read any further than the title, you might think that all of the attention to administrative bloat as a cost-driver in American higher education was finally producing some results. Think…
“Standards” and “College readiness.” Belief in the efficacy of the former and in the possibility of using them to create the latter (and an urgency manufactured through meaningless comparisons between American schools and others throughout the world) lies behind the current rush to impose the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on American public schools. The…
The UIC United Faculty (an AFT/AAUP union) announced a two-day strike next week: After 18 months of bargaining, the faculty at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is headed for a two-day strike on Tuesday, February 18th and Wednesday, February 19th. UIC professors did not want it to come to this, but the trustees’ proposals continue to…
I’ve enjoyed this video in support of legislation for equal compensation for all faculty in Colorado’s community colleges and asked colleague Don Eron to write about it. Don is a faculty member at UC Boulder, a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and a leader in the Colorado AAUP conference.…
Though she is perhaps best known for her 1966 skewering of LBJ, MacBird, perhaps all of us should be paying a little more attention to Barbara Garson today. Her book Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live should be out in paperback any day now. Here’s what Adam Hochschild says about it: Garson knows that the hard…
The topic that I am about to treat in this post might be a provocative starting point for a discussion in a wide range of courses: a course on rhetoric or argument, a course on mass media or news reporting, or a course on recent American political history, the nature of celebrity, or the increasing…