Over the last few weeks, the authors of several posts on this blog have sought to address recent outrageous assertions made by Rush Limbaugh. A little more than a year ago, I wrote the following post for Oxymoronic Nation, a personal, progressive blog that I started on Google. I was trying to place Limbaugh’s offensive…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 4 Kezar, Adrianna. Embracing Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: Making Change to Support the New Faculty Majority. New York: Routledge, 2012. A faculty member at the University of Southern California, Kezar has written several books on the issues currently confronting higher education. In Embracing Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, she…
It was only last fall that I heard of the Edwin Mellen Press. I was sent a book to review for Choice, which presents very short descriptive and generally positive reviews for the use of librarians. By Jason Mosser, The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles proved…
The following is an open letter to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College. Dear Chairperson Wolff, members of the Board of Trustees, and Chancellor Hyman: When I spoke to you last November, my concern in my very brief remarks had to do exclusively with the issue of…
An important issue has yet to take center stage in the debate simmering over the impact that credentialing will have on the relevancy of a college degree. There is a difference between completing certification that leads a student/employee to present credentials and verification that credentials actually demonstrate proficiency. What happens if our commitment to increasing…
Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3 Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012. This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of…
As I mentioned in my last Academe blog post, we weren’t quite sure what to expect after Duke University adopted Writing Commons as its textbook for its MOOC, English Composition 1, Achieving Expertise. Always the optimist, I imagined 50,000 to 70,000 students all banging on the server door at the same time. Plus, I anticipated additional traffic…
Writer and teacher John Warner lists his thoughts on automated essay grading for InsideHigherEd. He comes up with 22. For me, the ones that stand out are these: 6. … Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task. Grading writing, while time consuming and occasionally unpleasant,…
By Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years and is president of the SLU AAUP chapter. This is another chapter in the unfolding story of Saint Louis University, the struggle between the President and the faculty. When last we’d left our intrepid crew…
Yesterday on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh read a Wall Street Journal article summarizing the National Association of Scholars (NAS) study about Bowdoin, and quoted the finding that Bowdoin doesn’t require history majors to take an American history class. Limbaugh declared: So a history major at Bowdoin College is taught about the intrinsic discrimination against…