The Philadelphia Inquirer: Free-speech award goes to Penn professor
University of Pennsylvania history professor and free-speech advocate Alan Charles Kors defended the student who uttered the “water buffalo” comment at black female students in 1993 that pushed the university into a controversial national spotlight.
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Posted in Free speech
The Guardian: ‘Infantilised’ students unable to cope with life, book claims
Can students cope? Have your say on the Education blog
“Therapy culture” has invaded schools and universities creating a generation of “infantilised” students and lecturers unable to cope with rigorous academic life, authors of a new book claim.
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Posted in Students
The New York Times: Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.
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Posted in Students
The New York Times: Politics and the Classroom: One More Try
Readers who responded to my column lampooning the University of Colorado’s plan to raise $9 million for a chair in conservative thought aggressively reopened a question I took up in several columns written in 2006. The question, provoked by the fact that according to a survey only 2 or 3 percent of the C.U. faculty identifies as Republican, is, what is the relationship between the political affiliations of a faculty member and his or her classroom performance? And the answer I gave, and would still give, is none, necessarily.
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Posted in Commentary
The New York TImes: Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings, Too
FIRST came the Amazon book rankings, and word leaked out that perhaps some vaunted writers spent more time than you would think checking how popular they were, hour by hour. Then newspapers started tracking the most popular articles on their sites and journalists, it was said, spent more time than you would think watching their rankings, hour by hour.
But would you believe that academics could become caught up in such petty, vain competition? Of course, you say. Still, short of hanging out in the stacks at the library and peeking over shoulders, the pursuit of that particular vanity had to wait for the Internet, and the creation of the Social Science Research Network, an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading.
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Posted in Faculty
Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-fi-guatemala6-2008jun06,0,1032636.story?track=rssLeftist thinking left off the syllabus
Guatemala City
Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.
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Posted in Academics
Houston Chronicle: Denying access
Texas lawmakers must increase funding for state universities and reverse tuition hikes that price middle-class students out of the classroom
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Posted in Commentary
Sydney Morning Herald: Uni fees system branded irrational
A REVIEW of higher education will examine how to make the inconsistent fee system fairer.
A discussion paper released by the federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, at Macquarie University yesterday describes the funding system as “at best complex and at worst anomalous, inconsistent and irrational”.
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Posted in International
The Chronicle: Scholar Denied Entry to U.S. Speaks at AAUP Meeting — by Telephone
Washington — Adam Habib, a prominent South African scholar who was deported on arrival at a New York airport in October 2006 and whose visa was subsequently revoked, did manage to gain an audience in the United States this afternoon — via a telephone link.
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Posted in Government, Unions
The Chronicle: ‘Israel Lobby’ Professors Get Hospitable Greeting in Israel
Jerusalem — The first appearance in Israel by Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer since the publication of their controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, impressed a largely student audience at the Hebrew University, but left some faculty members wondering about their honesty.
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Posted in International
The Chronicle: UMass-Amherst Rescinds Honorary Degree for Robert Mugabe
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to withdraw an honorary law doctorate that was awarded in 1986 to President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
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Posted in Academics
The Register-Guard: Southwestern Oregon Community College faculty votes ‘no confidence’ in its president
COOS BAY — Judith Hansen came to Southwestern Oregon Community College in 2005 with an ambitious agenda. The newly appointed president planned to restructure the school’s leadership top to bottom, dissolving a hierarchy and leveling the decision-making process, making the institution more efficient and saving cash along the way.
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Posted in Administration
Baltimore Sun: Coppin professors lash out
But criticism is purged from accreditation report
As part of their school’s formal case for reaccreditation, Coppin State University officials watered down a faculty- and staff-written report critical of the college’s treatment of its core academic staff, records show.
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Posted in Accountability, Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: ‘Quiet Desperation’ of Academic Women
Interviews with 80 female faculty members at a research university — the largest qualitative study of its kind — have found that many women in careers are deeply frustrated by a system that they believe undervalues their work and denies them opportunities for a balanced life. While the study found some overt discrimination in the form of harassment or explicitly sexist remarks, many of the concerns involved more subtle “deeply entrenched inequities.”
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Posted in Equity, Faculty, Working conditions
Las Cruces Sun-News: Ex-professors cut off during regents’ public comment time
LAS CRUCES — A married pair of former professors and the mother of a student were cut off and threatened with removal during public comment at the New Mexico State University board of regents meeting Friday.
The three, who attempted to speak out against allegations made to the Sun-News, were allowed to speak until they addressed Regents Chairman Bob Gallagher by name.
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Posted in Administration, Faculty, Tenure & Promotion
San Francisco Chronicle: Bill seeks report cards on higher education
A key state legislator is pushing for an accountability system that would help parents and taxpayers tell whether the state’s colleges and universities are delivering on their promise of a quality education.
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Posted in Accountability
Maclean’s: McGill TAs to vote on tentative agreement
| June 9th, 2008 | 6:27 pm
Nine-week strike close to end, but outstanding lawsuits remain unsettled
Striking Teaching Assistants at McGill University will vote Thursday on a tentative agreement put forth by a government appointed conciliator. The proposal could end the bitter nine week strike.
The conciliator is recommending pay increases of 2.5 per cent in the first year, 3 per cent in the second and third, and 3.5 per cent in the fourth and final year of the contract.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Inside Higher Ed: ‘The Last Professors’
Two much-discussed trends in academe — the adoption of corporate values and the decline in the percentage of faculty jobs that are on the tenure track — are closely linked and require joint examination. That is the thesis of a new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, just published by Fordham University Press. Frank Donoghue, the author, is associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Donoghue recently responded to e-mail questions about the themes of his book.
Q: What prompted you to write this book? Does your career fit these trends?
A: More than any other factor, the career decision that prompted me to write The Last Professors was my move to Ohio State in 1989. I’d spent my prior academic life (undergrad, graduate school, my first teaching job) at elite private universities. Coming to a public, land grant university meant working at an institution that has no vast endowment, that is often strongly affected by the state’s economy and politics, and that is frequently forced to make very tough financial decisions. This new climate gave me an unmediated look at “how the university works,” to borrow the title phrase of Marc Bousquet’s new book. I reacted by reading everything I could find on the topic of academic labor (not much in 1990, other than Richard Ohmann’s English in America and Evan Watkins’ Work Time), and then began teaching courses on the subject. The book really grew out of those graduate seminars on academic labor, and I’m deeply grateful to the students who took them.
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Posted in Corporate University
The Chronicle Review: Extreme Work-Study 1
By Marc Bousquet
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Not that most of you will care very much, but one of the best contenders for the thoroughbred Triple Crown will race this Saturday. The horse’s moniker, “Big Brown,” expresses the owner’s gratitude to shipping giant UPS for renewing a contract with his trucking company. For folks like him, for full-time Teamster drivers, and for the customers who want their online-ordered crap at their doors tomorrow, UPS represents a good deal. The company’s also received plenty of good ink for its “Earn and Learn” financial-aid packages for part-time student employees.
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Posted in Contingent labor, Corporate University, Students
On the Sadness of Higher Education
Wall Street Journal: On the Sadness of Higher Education
By ALAN CHARLES KORS
May 27, 2008
The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the ’60s” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.
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Posted in Commentary