The purpose of the letters in this toolkit is to provide material that can be edited to be sent to listserves, to be posted on blogs or to be shared on social media sites, and to be submitted as op-eds to campus or community newspapers. Some of the letters may be too lengthy to be…
In my previous post, I remarked on the incongruities John Kasich’s appointment of Gordon Gee to lead a statewide study of how to increase affordability at Ohio’s public universities. I did not anticipate that I would then almost immediately come across an unsettling, related article at Cleveland.com. Written by Henry J. Gomes and Brent Larkin of…
On Monday, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Governor Kasich has appointed Gordon Gee, President Emeritus of Ohio State University, to “lead a study looking for ways to make college more affordable and relevant for Ohio students.” More specifically, Gee will “spend the next year working with other college presidents, K-12 education leaders, and the business…
These are my alternatives to the list created by Melia Robinson and Melissa Stanger for Business Insider. I am excluding works of nonfiction and listing my top three choices for each state. Titles included in the list compiled by Robinson and Stanger are indicated in boldface. Hawaii From Here to Eternity James Jones Heads by…
As we watched the government shutdown and fiscal crisis play out in Washington this week, the first thought crossing the minds of most Americans was how silly and dangerous the high stakes game of “we’re not sure what we want but we still want it” was in the court of global public opinion. The agreement…
This originally appeared in Raging Chicken Press on October 21, 2013. It is a fairly long article detailing changes in Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) policies regarding new buildings and capital projects. The more I looked in the financial schemes at the system within which I work, the more it became clear that…
In several previous posts under this title, I have focused on the rapidly widening gap between administrative compensation and faculty compensation, as well as on the compensation received by “celebrity” visiting faculty and adjunct faculty. In other posts, I have written about how things being packaged as “innovations,” such as MOOCs, will widen the gap…
Every four years, well ahead of even the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary, the Ames Straw Poll or Iowa Straw Poll is held. The atmosphere in Ames on that weekend is carnival-like, and, not surprisingly, there have been all sorts of irregularities in the voting: that is, each attempt to reduce those irregularities…
These are my alternatives to the list created by Melia Robinson and Melissa Stanger for Business Insider. I am excluding works of nonfiction and listing my top three choices for each state. Titles included in the list compiled by Robinson and Stanger are indicated in boldface. Alabama To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee Southern Discomfort…
The choices have been clear for a long time. One side, though, seemed to have won within the last decade. As Elaine Weiss, writing for the Huffington Post, says, there has been “a philosophical shift from education as a critical tool to advance democracy to a consumer-oriented system of individual choice, achievement, and even profit.”…