One of the outgrowths of the reduction in tenure-track lines, the growing number of candidates for any academic job, and the willingness of college and university administrations to rely on adjunct workers to teach lower-level courses has been an increasing timidity on the part of those lucky enough to find themselves on the tenure track.…
By Steve Macek, Speech Communication, North Central College Review of Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (Encounter Books, 2012) A student expelled for a Facebook post criticizing the construction of a new parking ramp at his college, a faculty member reported to a “threat assessment team” for posting a…
Although I live in a very Republican area and the candidates for whom I have voted have almost never won, I have almost never failed to vote. And I have never voted against a school levy—or for that matter a levy to support city or county parks or other civic improvements. But I did not vote…
This is a re-post from the “On the Issues” blog of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org/on-the-issues/] Although the details are shameful, it’s good to see the mainstream press publicizing the facts about higher education faculty appointments and compensation. A recent NBC report highlights these facts from the most recent annual survey…
It is a common tactic among bullies to be absolutely blind to their own insensitivity toward others while being hypersensitive to any perceived slights against them. And that truism has never been on display more absurdly and hypocritically than at this year’s NRA Convention in Texas. Amid all of the hyperventilated rhetoric about President Obama’s…
The following piece is being re-posted from the Catholic Higher Education Advocate [http://cheausa.org/], which reprinted it from The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper. The Catholic Higher Education Advocate is currently including this op-ed as part of a broader feature story, “Battle Intensifies at Boston College over Shared Governance,” covering the public back and forth between the Boston…
The lead for today’s installment of Meet the Press included the tease: “Is President Obama already a ‘lame duck’?” In 1933, the passage of the 20th Amendment shortened the period between the presidential election and the inauguration of the president so that if a sitting president were a “lame duck”—that is, either lost the election…
Conversation is the coin of the realm in American higher education. Shared governance rests upon reasonable, open and transparent communication. Internal and external constituencies – including parents, alumni, donors, political leaders, and the media – embrace the motivations and actions that shape education, often more so depending upon who delivers the message. Curiously, conversation can…
Guest blogger Gaye Tuchman is Professor Emertia of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (2009) and Making News (1978). Not so long ago you could ask, “What’s black and white and read all over,” and everyone knew you were referring to a newspaper (well maybe a blushing zebra). …
Historic Highs and Lows in Unemployment In my previous post in this series, I closed by noting that proponents of “right to work” might very well want to emphasize that eight of the ten states with the lowest current unemployment averages are “right to work” states. Those states are Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, South…