Sometimes we discover that administrators are not the enemies of the faculty but are companions in a single struggle. The following guest post is a repost of a piece by Tim Slekar of Schools Matter @ the Chalk Face. He is Dean of the School of Education at Edgewood College in Madison, WI.: Last week I…
Mitch Daniels’ attacks on the teaching of Howard Zinn have drawn widespread condemnation, even from the critics of Zinn that Daniels cited, and the conservative editor of Minding the Campus, John Leo (who condemned “politicians using their power to determine the curriculum or impose a version of history they happen to agree with”). But a few…
Mitch Daniels wrote a response (full text below) to the 90 Purdue professors who wrote to him about the controversy over Howard Zinn. Daniels claimed, “I have never made any suggestion that any university cease teaching whatever its faculty pleases, or cease using any book.” He apparently does not recall his demand in the original…
UPDATE: Read Mitch Daniels’ response to this letter here. July 22, 2013 An open letter to Mitch Daniels Dear President Daniels: We are writing in response to the recent news reports about emails you wrote while governor of Indiana. In those emails, you criticized the historian Howard Zinn and his work, and you sought to…
Admissions is hard, grueling and anxiety-filled work today. It is as much an art as a science. The best enrollment leaders must have great gut instincts that allow them to see the relationship among strategic planning, university budgets, friend and fund raising, federal and state regulations, and a common vision set by the president and…
Loss of Employment in Manufacturing before and during the Great Recession The following chart shows the loss of manufacturing jobs, by state, in the decade between 1996 to 2005. The right-to-work state are indicated in boldface type. States with a Loss of More than 20 Percent of Their Employment in Manufacturing: Alabama 74,900…
Two articles I read this morning, one from InsideHigherEd and the other from The New York Times, remind me how critical it is that we keep focused on the student and the basis of learning. The first article, “A Plea for ‘Close Learning’” by Scott Newstok, among other things reminds us that, for all of…
By Peter N. Kirstein Peter N. Kirstein is a professor of history at St. Xavier University, and the vice-president of the Illinois AAUP. Mitch Daniels is president of Purdue University, and considered a moderate Republican. I am not sure what that says about immoderate Republicans, but his recently publicized efforts as governor to ban Howard…
In his statement defending his efforts to censor Zinn’s book, Mitch Daniels argued, “Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.” Daniels’ office has been sending out quotes from seven historians critical of Zinn to support that claim. I surveyed…
This is a follow-up to John K. Wilson’s Posts on Mitch Daniels’ misunderstanding of academic freedom. Mitch Daniels’ and the Purdue Board of Trustees’ public defenses of his intention as governor of Indiana to prohibit the use of Howard Zinn’s histories in Indiana public schools focus largely, again, on Zinn’s supposed deficiencies as a historian.…