Former Northwestern professor David Protess writes a column at Huffington Post about a court’s ruling that requires Northwestern to reveal to the government “private communications between the students (and sometimes me) that included requests for references, breaking news about dead grandmothers and plans to meet for drinks.” Protess defends advocacy journalism, and concludes: “At stake…
In “Making It,” an essay in the new issue of Academe, Monica Jacobe talks about the public’s understanding of college as a route to the middle class and about public ire over the high cost of tuition. She says: What does not enter this conversation or, apparently, the minds of most of the stakeholders talking…
College student voting rights are under assault again. Back in July, “Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster stood before reporters and TV cameras Monday waving a list of 206 college students who ‘may have conducted voter fraud here in Maine.’” Webster declared, “If you want to get really honest, this is about how the Democrats…
The Massachusetts Republican Party has written to Harvard, demanding that they refuse to pay Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for teaching one class twice a week this fall on contract law. Nate Little, executive director of the state GOP, wrote in a letter to Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust: By restoring her to the faculty, even…
News outlets are reporting today that Adrienne Anderson died on Sept. 7 at the age of 59. Anderson was fired by the University of Colorado in 2005 after 12 years as an instructor in the environmental and ethnic studies departments, an important but overlooked academic freedom case. In 1999, Anderson noted how the University cancelled…
Yesterday, my co-blogger Ezra Deutsch-Feldman wrote about apparent abuses of management power at Sullivan University, a for-profit institution in Kentucky. Today, guest blogger Joe Berry looks for-profits from the other side, from the point of view of faculty. Joe is a labor educator and a contingent faculty activist; he has been active in both the…
The Navy ROTC has been restored at Harvard in the wake of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ending this week. But don’t expect any major changes, reports the Boston Globe (registration required, alas). The area’s ROTC commanding officer, Captain Curtis Stevens, reported: “It’s really about the numbers. You couldn’t have a viable unit just at Harvard…
Some good news: in a new survey of teenagers by the Knight Foundation, the percentage of high school students who believe “the First Amendment goes too far” in protecting the rights of citizens has dropped to a quarter (24 percent) in 2011 from nearly half (45 percent) in 2006. The more alarming news comes from…
Administrators at Sullivan University in Kentucky were trying to avoid an investigation, but they might regret how far they went to try to stop it – and in the process, they’ve earned themselves an additional investigation. It’s a long, complex story, but it illustrates just how far some for-profit schools will go to protect their business.
It all started this summer, when attorney general Jack Conway began a series of investigations into several for-profit schools in Kentucky (you may remember Conway from the 2010 senate race in Kentucky, where he lost to Rand Paul). One investigation for example, into Daymar College, is looking at whether the schools forced students to buy overpriced textbooks from the campus bookstore, misled students about whether their credits would transfer to other schools, and accepted students who did not meet Daymar’s minimum qualifications for admission.
Today is the last day to take the New Faculty Majority’s survey on contingent faculty appointments. With the survey, the NFM is trying to get a snapshot of the back-to-school experiences of faculty on contingent appointments by asking about hiring practices, orientations or lack thereof, and access to basic tools like photocopying and curricular materials.…