Category Archives: Academics

Express-News: Creationists delay bid for master’s degrees

A creation science group hoping to offer master’s degrees in Texas has postponed its application to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

The Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research wants state approval to grant online master’s degrees in science education to prepare teachers to “understand the universe within the integrating framework of biblical creationism,” according to the school’s mission statement.

Last month, a panel of educators recommended its approval to the Coordinating Board, drawing fire from supporters of teaching evolution.

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New York University Press has just published a new book by Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation .

Bousquet is a founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Check out his blog, here.

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National Academy Answers Creationist Challenge

Professors who have been blindsided by students who support intelligent design can look to the National Academy of Sciences for help. The academy and its sister Institute of Medicine today published a book, called Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that offers clear explanations about evolution and why creationism is not science. The book, which has answers to frequently asked questions in the back, is available on the academy’s Web site. The site will also present a live audio Webcast, on Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern time, to discuss the book.

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Inside Higher Ed: A Moderate MLA

The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. At this year’s annual meeting, in Chicago, some MLA members have worried that the association was poised to take stances that would have sent David Horowitz’s fund raising through the roof with resolutions that appeared to be anti-Israel and pro-Ward Churchill.

But in moves that infuriated the MLA’s Radical Caucus, the association’s Delegate Assembly refused to pass those resolutions and instead adopted much narrower measures. The association acknowledged tensions over the Middle East on campus, but in a resolution that did not single out pro-Israel groups for criticism. And the association criticized the University of Colorado for the way it started its investigation of Ward Churchill, but took no stand on whether the outcome (his firing) was appropriate.

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Inside Higher Ed:

Jonah Goldberg’s new book is being promoted with a little (and a little inaccurate) college bashing. The book jacket for Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, forthcoming in January from Doubleday, proclaims: “The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.” Leaving aside the rather large issue of the charge that Brown and Swarthmore educate for fascism, Kieran Healy — blogging at Crooked Timber — points out a factual problem: Swarthmore doesn’t award education degrees. Healy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, and commenters on the blog have a good time exploring “Swarthmorofascism.” A spokeswoman for the college confirmed that Healy is correct and Goldberg is not, and said she didn’t know why Goldberg made Swarthmore a target.

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The New York Times: A Threat So Big, Academics Try Collaboration

It is a basic tenet of university research: Economists conduct joint studies, chemists join forces in the laboratory, political scientists share ideas about other cultures — but rarely do the researchers cross disciplinary lines.

The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration.

But the threat of global warming may just change all that.

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San Francisco Chronicle: Notoriously selective Stanford considers accepting more students

Stanford University is considering increasing, for the first time in decades, the number of students it enrolls each year.

The idea comes after Stanford, one of the most selective schools in the country, admitted just 10 percent of applicants this year, the smallest percentage ever.

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Houston Chronicle: Creationist school offers a degree of controversy

Science teachers are not allowed to teach creationism alongside evolution in Texas public schools, the courts have ruled. But that’s exactly what the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research wants them to do.

The institute is seeking state approval to grant an online master’s degree in science education to prepare teachers to “understand the universe within the integrating framework of Biblical creationism,” according to the school’s mission statement.

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The New York Times: Report to Urge Sweeping Change for SUNY System

Warning that New York has “slipped in stature” and that its once-powerful position in national research has “faded,” a commission set up by Gov. Eliot Spitzer is recommending that the state free its public colleges and universities to raise tuition without the Legislature’s approval and to charge different prices from campus to campus.

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Houston Chronicle: Accrediting group puts Texas Tech on probation

LUBBOCK — Texas Tech University has been placed on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, a regional accrediting organization, officials said on Wednesday.

Texas Tech was put on probation for failing to show that its curriculum met college-level competencies, according to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which issued the probation during an annual meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday.

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Tallahassee Democrat: Ammons: FAMU ready to rebound from probation

One day after suffering a setback in New Orleans, Florida A&M University President James Ammons told students, staffers and faculty what’s next for the institution.

Tuesday, the organization that accredits FAMU extended the institution’s probation for six more months. Probation is the most severe sanction doled out by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. But on Wednesday, Ammons didn’t want the group of about 100 to be disappointed by the outcome.

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On behalf of the officers, steering committee, and communications committee of the Working Class Studies Association, I am pleased to announce the public debut of the Working Class Studies Association Website

http://www.wcstudies.org/

We hope the Website will be a useful and timely resource for anyone interested in working class life and culture, and an instrument for working class studies. We invite you to the site and hope you will use this opportunity to join the Working Class Studies Association. You will receive UserID and Password information to access member-only pages when you join.

This is a new site with most of its potential still to be developed. We welcome appropriate content and ideas – please submit to the email addresses on the site.

best wishes,

Michael Zweig
Secretary, Working Class Studies Association

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The Globe and Mail: LLB or JD? Fierce debate a matter of degree

When Bill Flanagan hit the send button on an e-mail message last Friday, the dean of law at Queen’s University knew there was a pretty good chance he would get some angry replies. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was that reaction to his message would flood e-mail inboxes around the planet with embarrassing anti-American sentiment.

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Inside Higher Ed: Few Policies on Plagiarism

In 2003, the American Historical Association got out of the business of adjudicating complaints of plagiarism, saying that the association could best promote good scholarship by issuing standards and promoting education about them. Journals, other publishers and colleges and universities are better suited than an association to consider plagiarism complaints, the AHA said, and they all have various sanctions they can impose.

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The Chronicle: A Class Traitor in Academe

By Thomas H. Benton
An Academic in America

“Thomas H. Benton,” an associate professor of English, offers his take on academic work and life.

It’s easy to find books on race and gender in academic life, but only a handful focus on social class.

I know of four. They are all essay collections that came to me like life preservers when I was drowning in graduate school: Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class (1984), edited by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey; Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993), edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay; This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (1995), edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law; and Teaching Working Class (1999), edited by Sherry Lee Linkon.

All four books include female and minority writers, and, as such, they underline how the ties of solidarity that come from class awareness are often stronger than the divisions that generally preoccupy academe.

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