College Castes

In an article last week on School Board News Today entitled “The New College ‘Caste System’–and How We Might Change It,” Lawrence Hardy writes: At a Washington, D.C., forum this week called “2013 College Rankings and Higher Education’s New Caste System,” a Texas college president, journalists from the Washington Monthly and elsewhere, and a key Obama administration aide,…

“Vodka Sam” May Be a Symptom of a Problem, but She Herself Is Not the Problem—Not Even the Public Relations Problem

Last week, the Princeton Review released its annual rankings of U.S. colleges and universities. In the category “Top Party Schools,” the University of Iowa was ranked #1, moving up from its #2 ranking last year and bumping last year’s “winner” West Virginia University from the top spot. A spokesperson for the university responded to the…

Ohio Conference President, John McNay, Testifies before Ohio House’s Higher Education Reform Study Committee

On Monday, September 9, Ohio Conference AAUP President John McNay delivered testimony [full text provided below] to the Higher Education Reform Study Committee–a new standing committee started in the Ohio House of Representatives over the summer. The committee has embarked on a “road show,” traveling all over the state to public and for-profit colleges to discuss…

Rebuilding Higher Education: Playing to Win

President Obama has set the higher education agenda for the remainder of his term by linking consumer fears with politics. There is substance in the president’s arguments about sticker price, the squeezing of the American middle class, and the failure to provide access to a higher education degree for those who seek it. The fundamental…

How Big-Time College Football Is Like Walmart

Writing for Business Insider, Cork Gaines has surveyed “All the Crazy College Football Uniforms for This Season” [http://www.businessinsider.com/new-college-football-uniforms-2013-8?op=1]. On its surface, the article seems a survey of an aspect of the sport that has become increasingly eccentric, almost a gimmicky trademark for some teams. Long the trendsetter in mutating and eye-popping uniforms, the University of…

A Critique of Richard Vedder’s Recommendations for Higher Education, Made in Response to President Obama’s Recent Proposals

Part 4: Create a National College Equivalency Test Similar to the GED. [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an earlier post, I pointed…

A Most Unusual Violence on Campus Story

On the evening of August 20, two students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign went to the emergency room of the local hospital with darts in their arms. The students had been walking several blocks away from each other. Each reported feeling a sudden sharp pain in the left forearm and looking down to…

A Critique of Richard Vedder’s Recommendations for Higher Education, Made in Response to President Obama’s Recent Proposals

Part 3: Reduce the Cost of a Degree by 40% by Reducing Labor and Capital Costs. [Explanatory lead to the first post in this series: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an…

I Honestly Don’t Know What to Make of This

I teach courses in postcolonial literatures and cultures, and I like to think that I have moved largely beyond a self-referential and reductive perception of unfamiliar aspects of other cultures as exotic or bizarre. But then I come across a news item that leaves me wondering whether it is worth my time to wonder what…