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…
Various talented folks and communities (e.g., the Open Knowledge Foundation and QuestionCopyright.org) believe Creative Commons should retire its NC ND clauses. Students for Free Culture argue the NC clause is “completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work).” Timothy Vollmer asserts the NC ND clauses should be renamed ““Commercial Rights Reserved” because this license fails…
In my last post, I wrote on the need for a comprehensive redesign of the collegiate business model. The numbers don’t work, the model typically addresses incremental budget adjustments at best, and the bureaucratic “mom and pop” shops who administer the budget at many colleges inhibit broader cooperative partnerships that can hold down costs and…
Sources: National Center for Education Statistics, Bloomberg News, Chronicle of Higher Education, Blumenstyk and Fuller Number of post-secondary institutions newly accredited between 2005 and 2009: 483. Percentage of post-secondary institutions newly accredited between 2005 and 2009 that were private for-profit institutions: 77%. Percentage of total accredited post-secondary institutions in the U.S. that were private for-profit…