Merry Christmas, You’re Fired Two days before Christmas, all 20 employees of the Snarf’s Sub Shop at 600 West Chicago, in Chicago, received e-mails saying that their positions were being eliminated. According to the owners, the restaurant has persistently done considerably less business than projected, a complete overhaul of the menu and space has been…
Jamie Dimon is the oft-embattled CEO of J. P. Morgan Chase. The Dimon family’s 2013 Christmas card is a panoramic shot that has to be viewed in sections to be appreciated. At least one commentator has suggested that it looks like a Ralph Lauren advertisement: Not to be outdone, the Kardashian family has reportedly spent…
Last year, as Christmas approached, I gathered some articles that seemed to suggest that we weren’t quite understanding concept of “holiday spirit.” Here are the headlines to those articles: “Six Toys That Could Make a Progressive’s Head Explode” “A Jolly Christmas, Retailers Count the Extra Days” “Americans Buying More Gifts for That Special Someone—Themselves” “Five…
This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________
Yesterday John K. Wilson wrote about the Kansas Board of Regents new policy mandating institutional oversight of the blog posts, tweets, and other public digital communications of faculty and staff at Kansas colleges and universities. Because it is not restricted to communications made with institutional resources, this policy goes well beyond violating of academic freedom,…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ As happens too often in higher education these days, the recent push to increase college completion rates shows how laudable goals can become problematic when pursued in narrow, rigid ways. Who wouldn’t want to increase the numbers of college…
The article was written by my former student and friend Mike Lamm. Mike is a reporter for the Decatur Daily Democrat. This may be a somewhat desperate attempt to link the topic of this piece to academia, but after I read it, I couldn’t help but wonder how the folks who have done the R&D…
By Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin Universities are a public trust. Citizens give their precious dollars to these schools with the understanding that their scholars will study, educate, and innovate for the future. Academics have freedom to think, and they also have an obligation to use their research for the broader public good.
As the first national AAUP president from a collective bargaining chapter, I frequently heard the Association described by some as “just another union” and by others as an irrelevant and ineffectual vestige of a less complicated and more innocent time. There are those who view the staff and the elected leadership as either politically naïve…
At Wright State, we have “Garcetti language” in our contract, protecting criticism of the administration as an aspect of academic freedom. We don’t abuse this right, but if our administration endorsed the sort of policy just approved by the Kansas Board of Regents for the public universities across that state, we would lambaste them on…