Business Insider presents some wonderful photo sequences. One of the recent pieces is Tony Manfred’s “40 Stunning Photos That Show You What College Football Was Like 100 Years Ago” [http://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-college-football-photos-100-years-ago-2013-9?op=1]. Take a look at this photo of the Army Mascot from 1910 to 1915:
For his piece in the September-October issue of Academe, William Vesterman looks back – way back – and learns contemporary lessons from early twentieth-century economist Thorstein Veblen. Vesterman, a professor at Rutgers, explains the shameful scandal of Mike Rice, the Rutgers basketball coach who was fired after his abusive practices became public. Unfortunately, the university’s…
At this point, no one can deny that higher education has changed seriously over the last few decades. Call it corporatization, or administrative bloat, or any other name, but the symptoms are clear: more administrative control over things that had been the faculty’s. Faculty governance becoming a mere rubber stamp for administrators’ proposals. Less funding…
Online teaching remains one of the most talked-about topics of the day in higher education, and there are no shortage of studies on the topic. Do students learn more online? Do they learn less? Do they learn slightly less, but maybe it saves so much money that administrators will still find it appealing? But left…
Or, Eight Reasons Why the Education Petition is Inadequate, Misguided, and Generally Useless The August 24 statement by AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum was compelling enough to generate some actual responses on the Academe Blog. The post was a response to Barak Obama’s dreadful education proposals, and it’s a pretty good statement. You can read it…
As American universities start to collaborate more closely with colleges and universities in other countries, ticklish questions are beginning to arise. Oh yes, the questions have been around for a long time, but only now are they beginning to have an impact on American faculties. Few places in the world outside of the US and…
When Joe Moxley first published Writing Commons, an online textbook, the copyright (as is common) was held by his publisher, Pearson. After five years, their ownership of the work ended and the copyright belonged to Moxley again. He realized that he now had a number of interesting options for the future of his work. After…
Silvio Lacetti is a recently retired professor from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. While attending a retirement party for a colleague, he happened upon an intriguing idea: What if, rather than having a single retirement party, he organized dozens of small dinners, with one of his old students at each? And rather than…
In a conversation with a newly retired and highly respected college president late last week, the conversation turned to the growing problem of how to govern American colleges and universities in uncertain times. American higher education operates on a system of shared governance. It is often presented as a 3-leg stool with each leg balancing…
The September-October issue of Academe has just been posted (and will be in your mailboxes soon). In the issue, Rick Perloff looks at the campaign to unionize Cleveland State University twenty years ago, and William Vesterman looks even further back—to turn-of-the-century economist Thorstein Veblen—to learn lessons about the university today. Leslie Bary uses the benefit…