The pace of change is accelerating within American higher education. The debates raging over MOOC’s, the impact of specific programmatic strategies like Coursera, the role of for-profit providers, and the arguments laid out recently in defense of the liberal arts tradition illustrate this point. The Obama Administration’s efforts to increase access and college-going rates and…
The following is a guest post by Donna Potts, chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences. She is also a contributor to the newest issue of Academe. In this post, she expands on the issues in her Academe article. Watching the movie Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is abducted into the sex trade and heroically…
[Guest Blogger Walter Brasch is a syndicated social issues columnist, the author of 17 books, and a former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. His latest is Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, available at amazon.com, www.greeleyandstone.com, and bookstores. Dr. Brasch was a university professor of mass communications and journalism for 30 years.]…
The 98% of scientists who have been warning of climate change that is perilously close to becoming irreversible have pointed repeatedly to the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. Unfortunately, “global warming” predated “climate change” as the term for this crisis. So, despite considerable video evidence of the ice sheets sliding into the sea, if it…
1. Walmart has 8,500 stores in 15 countries. In 2012, it was the international corporation in terms of gross revenues, at $447 billion. The corporation’s net income was $12.7 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, its gross revenues slightly exceed the GDP of Argentina, which according to the International Monetary Fund has the 27th…
The AAUP and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation have just issued an advisory statement on “Accreditation and Academic Freedom,” and I find it a very disappointing document.
The November-December issue of Academe looks at faculty service. It is perhaps the most ambiguous of the traditional triad along with teaching and research, and the articles in this issue seek to describe the different ways that faculty conceive of service, and the different ways that service is (or is not) recognized. Read the issue…
The November-December issue of Academe looks at faculty service. It is perhaps the most ambiguous of the traditional triad along with teaching and research, and the articles in this issue seek to describe the different ways that faculty conceive of service, and the different ways that service is (or is not) recognized. Read the issue…
One of the things that those of us who teach in public institutions, particularly those granting two-year degrees, have long known is that students get a better value from us than from the for-profit institutions that have been pushing so hard to compete with us. Now, with growing online opportunities from state institutions, the difference…
With a nod to Frank Luntz, I would like to brainstorm some alternatives to the phrase “fiscal cliff,” which is actually an abbreviated version of “driving or stepping off a fiscal cliff.” The most common alternatives that I have heard to date are “fiscal slope” and “fiscal curve.” Although both phrases serve to eliminate the…