The following statement was made yesterday by the Purdue AAUP about plans to cut faculty positions at Purdue Calumet. An hour after the AAUP statement was released, the chancellor sent a memo expressing hope that the cuts can be rescinded. Faculty Terminations at Purdue Calumet The recent announcement of faculty terminations by the Administration at…
Certainly since Lyndon Johnson pushed through the social safety-net programs known collectively as the Great Society, but even since FDR began to create the first of those safety-net programs as part of his New Deal, the Far Right has been arguing vehemently that such programs are tantamount to communism, that they represent an unethical and…
One of the best ways to determine where a college or university is headed is to look at the composition and quality of the senior administrative team that the president inherits on the first day in office. The look and feel – quite literally – of an inherited team speaks to the mindset and culture…
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford are both conservative politicians with personalities as outsized as their physical selves. (How is that for a euphemistic way of saying that, like me, they are very fat?) But despite those broad similarities, their political fortunes, at least of late, could not be more different.…
When the proponents of austerity and the opponents of “big government” make their case to the public, they emphasize the inefficiencies in public services and the waste of public resources. So the implication is that taxpayers’ money can be saved—and taxes can even be reduced–without actually reducing the public services that taxpayers receive. One of…
In my first two posts in this series (links provided at the end of this post), I commented on the excessive compensation being received by David Petraeus for teaching a course as an adjunct faculty member at a CUNY campus and by Gordon Gee as president of Ohio State. This post provides updates on both…
In several earlier posts (see the links below), I have chronicled the ridiculous pronouncements of Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert and “rock legend” and NRA spokesman Ted Nugent. At the risk of giving these two bozos much more attention that they deserve, I think that it is important to chronicle the asinine things that they keep…
Former major-leaguer Doug Glanville long ago shifted from glove to pen, and quite successfully. Today, for The New York Times, he writes about Alex Rodriguez, discussing how the quest for numbers misses the real point and beauty of baseball. Two paragraphs stopped me: Now major league baseball is in overdrive, stalking the players who inflated…
As a new president in the 1990s, one of my early tasks was to sign an exchange agreement with a private Russian university. The provost and I completed our business in Moscow and headed through London to visit a second exchange program of long-standing with a British institution. While passing through Heathrow airport, a British…
Let me make something clear: Teaching cannot be reduced to its tools. Let me give you an example, though I doubt anyone reading this really needs one. One of the devices I use in the classroom is the lecture. It allows me to introduce information to students in an organized fashion. I cannot package my…