Once I worked as a waiter in an elegant hotel. The headwaiter, just as I happened to be passing one day, dropped a tray. I scurried to help clean up; the manager ran over in response to the noise. The headwaiter intercepted him, telling him that I was the one who dropped the tray. You…
Earlier this week, I was one of the 13 million American television viewers—along with uncounted millions of viewers in 200+ other countries–who tuned in to the Discovery Channel to watch Nik Wallenda walk across a gorge of the Grand Canyon on a two-inch steel cable. He carried a 30-foot-long balancing pole that weighed a little…
From: info@futureofhighered.org [mailto:info@futureofhighered.org] Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 10:50 AM To: cic@staff.cic.net Subject: Letter from Campaign for the Future of Higher Education June 24, 2013 Dear Members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation: We read with interest your recent paper, “CIC Online Learning Collaboration: A Vision and Framework [http://www.cic.net/docs/default-source/reports/cic-online-learning-collaboration.pdf?sfvrsn=2],” and the Inside Higher Ed coverage of it [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/19/big-10-provosts-question-partnerships-ed-tech-companies#.UcGeqhW1_FY.email.].…
The organization OurTime is asking that you visit their website at http://www.ourtime.org/july1st/ before July 1st and sign a petition asking the President and the Congress to keep the interest rates on student loans at 3.4% and to prevent them from rising to 6.8%. Total student loan debt now totals more than $1 trillion, exceeding credit-card…
In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Major Scobie steps outside of a house filled with the ill and dying: The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night also gave an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew,…
The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education – CFHE for short – is a GRASSROOTS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to support quality higher education. It was initiated in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 2011, by leaders of faculty organizations from 21 states. CFHE’s fifth meeting was held in Columbus, Ohio, on May 17 and 18, 2013.…
This is a postscript to my post “And Here I Thought That Louie Gohmert Was the Most Ridiculous Congressman from Texas” [https://academeblog.org/2013/06/20/and-here-i-thought-that-louie-gohmert-was-the-most-ridiculous-congressman-from-texas/]. One of the few bills to receive overwhelming bipartisan support over the past three years has been one that eliminated the use of the word “lunatic” in all federal legislation. Paralleling the 2010…
On June 21, Florida Atlantic University reappointed adjunct professor Deandre Poole, who had sparked controversy by asking students to step on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” on it in a lesson about conformity. The action followed a June 20 report from the FAU Faculty Senate’s Academic Freedom and Due Process Committee. The…
by Peter Wood This post was originally published on June 17 at Minding the Campus. Author Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. We asked for (and received) permission to re-post the article here, in light of a guest post by Allan Lichtman of American University that is a response to Wood.…
Periodically, it’s always prudent to take a step backward to reflect on the state of American higher education in the first years of the 21st-century. It looks very different today from the higher education system that we inherited from the leadership guiding higher education policy after the Vietnam War. The currents affecting American colleges and…