COCAL Updates
By Joe Berry 1. Reports on Campus Equity Week • Event page • CEW 2011 blog • COCAL (links including CEW from 2007) • AAUP • AFT NJ
The Danger of Thought Policing by Donors
George Leef of the Pope Center responds today to my critique here last week of his argument by claiming I’m creating a “straw man” and offering the hypothetical where a rich leftist “will give the school a huge amount of money (say, $100 million) if it creates a new chair in the department for a…
Program Closures Around the Country
Reductions in state support are forcing public colleges and universities across the country to raise tuition and fees. A small but growing number of institutions are also acting on financial grounds to eliminate undergraduate majors, graduate programs, or even entire academic departments. In an effort to document this troubling trend, Academe has created an interactive…
An Interview with Joan DelFattore on Academia
Joan DelFattore is a professor of English and legal studies at the University of Delaware and the author of Knowledge in the Making: Academic Freedom and Free Speech in America’s Schools and Universities. You can read DelFattore’s essay on Garcetti earlier this year in Academe, and John Elmore’s review of her book in Academe. I…
Rush Limbaugh’s Skulls Full of Mush
Rush Limbaugh hates college. He hated it when he was a student flunking out of Southeast Missouri State, and he hates it even more today. According to Rush, Barack Obama’s plan to help students with loans is a vast conspiracy to help “big education” which destroys the minds of students: Suzy Creamcheese gets into George…
Jersey Shore Meets the U of Chicago
I believe that the two most diametrically opposed cultures in the United States are Jersey Shore and the University of Chicago. So that makes all the more bizarre to learn about a conference in Hyde Park on Friday analyzing the MTV reality show, Jersey Shore. The conference program reveals over-the-top (and I’m sure very much…
High-Pressure Recruitment Tactics at For-Profits
A few weeks ago, I looked at some of the methods which for-profit universities use to get “leads” on potential students. Getting contact information on a possible new student is, however, just the first step. The next steps are to get in touch with the potential student and convince them to enroll. In today’s blog…
The Myth of Banning ROTC
Last week, an InsideHigherEd article about ROTC at Brown University contained an unfortunate but all too common error: “Like many of their counterparts, Brown professors voted in 1969 to remove ROTC from campus…” This never happened, at Brown or (as far as I’m aware) any other university. As the Brown committee’s report makes clear, it…
Leef Defends Pope
George Leef of Art Pope’s Center for Higher Education Policy denounces Jane Mayer’s recent profile of Pope in the New Yorker as a “scurrilous attack.” But Leef’s response reveals how accurate many of the critiques were. Leef argues, “it’s no more possible to ‘buy the curriculum’ than it is to corner the silver market.” His…
COCAL Updates
By Joe Berry COCAL Updates (Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor) http://www.chicagococal.org/ 1. A nice little history of anti-Wall Street protests in US history and some useful suggestive lessons. 2. Recent grads turn to adjuncting. 3. The new Emmy award-winning documentary on the freedom riders of 1961 has many lessons for us, especially just now.…