After more than six months of being locked out of their radio station, WZRD, students at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) have finally been allowed back into their station, and returned to the air today. The WZRD students posted on facebook, “we are back in the driver seat once again.”
Apparently as our first act of political will in 2013, we have “kicked the can down the road” to sail the can past the “fiscal cliff” to land somewhere where we can rediscover it in time for the “big fight” in March. And these are the folks who in their wisdom are demanding increased oversight…
Mark Naison, the author of this post, is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. The post originally appeared on Naison’s blog With a Brooklyn…
No matter the metrics devised, grading is subjective. All grading. How can I say this? Don’t the scales created offer objective data? No. The decision-making in creation of the scales is necessarily subjective itself, making all evaluation using the scales just as subjective. Yet we continue to believe in the objective status of grades. Here…
The other day, an article appeared titled “The Ten Least Stressful Jobs of 2013.” Normally, I wouldn’t pay any attention to such an article (I think rankings of the sort provided are puerile, at best, and extremely uninformative and unhelpful), but this one places “university professor” at the top–and I am quoted in it. The reporter…
In September, I posted to this blog an entry titled “Requiem for the Twinkie,” in which I observed that the venture-capital firms that hold a controlling interest in Hostess Bakeries were attempting to plunder worker pensions as a last step in their wringing all possible profit out of the company that they were purportedly trying…
The AAUP has issued a report on the University of Northern Iowa (pdf), finding that the university had “no legitimate basis, financial or otherwise” to terminate faculty appointments and failed to follow its own policies. UNI president Ben Allen has issued a response to the AAUP report. You can read coverage of the report in…
While I was reading Stanley Fish’s New York Times article “Religious Exemptions and the Liberal State: A Christmas Column” all I could think of was a comment Bill O’Reilly made at the beginning of the month, claiming Christianity as a philosophy, not a religion–and of an experience of mine as a young man. Fish discusses Brian Leiter’s…
As a teacher at a college with a student population made up primarily of minorities, immigrants, and/or first-generation college students, an article in today’s New York Times hit home. By Jason DeParle, it is titled “For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall.” One of my greatest frustrations, and one I constantly work…
This week, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released a draft statement, entitled “Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance”, which in part originated with the following presentation that I have given at several state conference meetings over the past year. A couple of years ago, I served as chair of a committee…