In Kosovo, students had been clashing with police for weeks, with dozens of police and students reportedly injured in the process. The students were intent on removing not just the head of Pristina University, the small country’s major university, but also a number of the faculty, after it became apparent that their academic credentials were…
The following announcement has just been disseminated by the Department of Labor. _________________________ NLRB Invites Briefs Regarding Religious University Jurisdiction and Faculty Member Status February 10, 2014 The National Labor Relations Board is inviting briefs from interested parties on two questions: whether a religiously-affiliated university is subject to the Board’s jurisdiction, and whether certain university…
My parents spent about a tenth of my father’s annual income to send me to a Jesuit prep school. In one of my first English courses, the young Jesuit who was teaching the course was trying to explain to us the difference between an image, a metaphor, and a symbol. At some point, he used…
So says Richard Vedder in “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators,” an article by Joe Marcus appearing last week on Huffington Post. Marcus writes: Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show.…
I always learn from and enjoy the comments made by readers of this blog, print media and through social media like Twitter. One comment struck me this week, in particular, that cast light on a growing and persistent problem within higher education. How do we create a pipeline between higher education sectors to benefit our…
Ahead of the Super Bowl, an MSNBC employee tweeted that he expected that a Cheerios commercial featuring a bi-racial couple would provoke outrage from the Far Right. GOP national chairman, Reince Priebus, denounced the tweet as an inflammatory mischaracterization of the Far Right. MSNBC President Phil Griffin then apologized for the tweet, describing it as…
For the past five to six months, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been confronting a seemingly ever-increasing number of legislative and legal investigations into misconduct by his immediate subordinates, starting with the politically motivated decision to close lanes leading onto the George Washington Bridge but expanding into seeming improprieties in how federal funds allocated…
My Professional Activity Report and Self Evaluation (or PARSE) is over twenty pages long… not counting all of the required documentation. PARSE was instituted to save time and space–it’s all on computer and just needs ‘updating’ each year–but it seems to have become a repository of everything that can either be scanned or entered having…
When I read the headline that King Jong Un had received an honorary degree, I assumed immediately that it had been awarded by a North Korean University. I was surprised that it had been awarded by a private Malaysian University, but I was not aware that, except for China, Malaysia has maintained closer relations with…
In an earlier post, “Meningitis B at Princeton and at the University of California at Santa Barbara” (https://academeblog.org/2013/12/10/meningitis-b-at-princeton-at-the-university-of-california-at-santa-barbara/), I reported on the outbreaks of the disease among students at the two campuses and on the decision by the Centers for Disease Control to allow a vaccine not yet approved for use in the U.S. to…