Yesterday, I posted on the ‘digital badges’ that some think may point the way toward an alternative form of educational certification. I don’t think that’s a good idea, but I didn’t really explain why (saying I would later get to why that’s not the same as a college degree). This morning, I saw a link…
“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!” That, from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, of course, is all I could think of on reading Kevin Carey’s New York Times piece “Show Me Your Badge” a few days before the election. I hope most…
More than four months after Northeastern Illinois University shut down the student-run radio station WZRD and banned the students from broadcasting, the lockout continues. On November 6, acting director of Student Leadership Development Veronica Rodriguez wrote a memo announcing her decision about the fate of WZRD. Rodriguez declared that WZRD could be restored to an…
In the course of research for my current book, I’ve been reading an essay, a screed really, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916 by Randolph Bourne. Something he wrote struck me, not for my work, but in light of all the discussions this week concerning the election and expectations about who would vote–about…
Throughout this seemingly endless electoral campaign, most Americans were told more than they ever wanted to know about the deficiencies of the two major-party candidates for the presidency. (I say “most Americans” because some of our friends and neighbors somehow managed to remain uninformed, under-informed, and undecided into the last days of the campaign; so…
Members of the English Department at Queensborough Community College asked me to share this open letter with the wider AAUP and faculty communities. A letter from one individual member of the department can be found here: Dear President Call, This is an open letter written on behalf of the 22 fulltime English Professors who voted…
In an open letter published this afternoon, Associate Professor of English at the CUNY campus Queensborough Community College Susan Jacobowitz describes better than I can the QCC situation that has been unfolding since September. The latest complication was a vote, just before Hurricane Sandy, by the members of the English Department to remove their Chair…
This is a guest post by Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years. He recently became president of the SLU chapter of AAUP. Father Lawrence Biondi, president of Saint Louis University, is widely recognized, off and on campus, as having constructed, over the…
It certainly wasn’t Obama’s education policies that led me to support him. Between Obama and the Republicans there is little daylight. Both sides of our “great” political divide have fallen under the spell of the education “reformers,” the corporatists who want to wrest control of education (and education dollars) from the public sector, making it…
Dr. Brian C. Mitchell is the retired president of Bucknell University and former president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is the president of Brian Mitchell Associates and director of the Edvance Foundation. He can be reached at: bmitchell@edvancefoundation.org A great number of us within the higher ed community are watching with interest the developments in…