One of the favorite rhetorical devices of those on the Far Right is to take a charge leveled against them by progressives, to co-opt the language used to articulate that charge, and then to reframe the debate with the co-opted language so that it seems that the logic of their position is not just credible…
Today the U.S. Department of Education released a letter to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the agency that revoked accreditation for San Francisco City College. The letter came in response to a complaint filed by the California Federation of Teachers. The short version: ACCJC now has a year to “take immediate…
Internships used to be a way for students to gain some practical experience in their fields before they actually graduated and entered the job market. In most cases, interns worked on special projects directly related to their areas of study or assisted people with advanced positions within their prospective fields. In many cases, the internships…
Cultural Representations of Higher Ed, No. 8 I am working backwards through this list. Here are films 1 to 50. The rankings are my own and in most cases somewhat arbitrary. The descriptions of the films are paraphrases of summaries found in a half-dozen print and online film guides. I compiled the list about a…
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 An hour after the AAUP statement was released, the chancellor sent a memo expressing hope that the cuts can be rescinded.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…