Cultural Representations of Higher Ed, No. 6 I am working backwards through this list. Here are films 101 to 150. 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…
Yes, the new alarm from the Far Right, the ideological core of the political party that can find much additional funding for corporate agriculture but is unable to find a justification for the cost of the food-stamp and school-lunch programs, is that America is coming perilously close to being unable to defend itself. Forget about…
by: Ioana Literat, George Carstocea, Ash Kramer A reflection on the MOOC debate in higher education, this post was written in the context of Prof. Virginia Kuhn’s graduate seminar, IML 555: Digital Pedagogies, at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California. As students in this class, a key element of our research project was enrolling in…
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, should be fired. That’s a statement I don’t make lightly. It’s also a statement I don’t make because of Daniels’ idiotic comments demeaning historian Howard Zinn. Instead, the problem with Daniels is his failure to understand or protect academic freedom, which is one of the…
Critics of our current political system have frequently complained about the “revolving door” through which former legislators and other government officials pass on their way to K Street—to earning riches as lobbyists. But there are some indications that another revolving door may be opening, to the presidential mansions on university campuses. Three U.S. presidents served…
“The truth is that I could have had gotten more money or more prestigious places.” So says David Patraeus, who has diffused a controversy about his pay for teaching a couple of courses (with numerous teaching assistants) at a City University of New York campus by refusing compensation of possibly $200,000 in favor of a…
Having some awareness of the concept and history of tragedy in the theater may be somewhat helpful, I think, in responding to an out-sized current event such as the George Zimmerman murder trial. Most people would assume that if the word “tragedy” were to be applied at all to this murder case, it would have…
There are excellent philosophical arguments about why universities are expressions of the public good. They are accurate, time-honored and true. But the best demonstration – and the most closely watched – is how a university responds to its environment. Before local budgets tightened in the 1990s, there was something sacrosanct about town/gown relations. Colleges were…
InsideHigherEd reports on the case of Jared Lisonbee, a tenure-track professor at Weber State in Utah who was fired after only two years, and who had criticized the decision to name a center at Weber State after a prominent Mormon leader.
In the non-stop, intensive media attention to the George Zimmerman murder trial, you may have missed another court decision, one with perhaps equally broad, if not as deadly, implications for ordinary Americans. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld a dentist’s decision to fire his dental hygienist because she was so attractive as to be “irresistible” and…