mortiz055

I exaggerate a bit.  When the press covers for-profit diploma mills or exploding student debt, it is smart and skeptical.    When they cover college funding or ed-tech, it gets gullible and naive.  Take a recent entry from the New York Times :  Bringing Tech Culture to the Staid College Quad .  First of all, what non-hibernating person thinks the college quad is staid?  A major Atlantic Monthly  analysis of "The Dark Power of Fraternities" showed being on the quad endangers your health.  In staid Santa Barbara this year, some of my students were date-raped, stalked, framed by the local cops, and killed in a drive-by shooting.  The college quad sees protests about racism, abortion, foreign policy, police violence, and administrative misconduct .  The quad does teaching and research that is generally over the horizon of the average newsroom.   Staid  is a patronizing and ridiculous wo...

As you may know, there have been rumors of a significant rise in the co-payments that UC's health insurance plans require as part of coverage of "specialty drugs" that are often needed by the most endangered members of the workforce (people suffering from cancers, MS, HIV, liver ailments etc). In the aftermath of Union pressure and employee mobilization, Vice President Dwaine Duckett has announced that there will not be changes to the ways that "specialty drugs" will be treated by the different health care plans. It is difficult to tell whether this was, in fact, a serious possibility that was pushed back by union activism or simply something floated in the course of discussions.  But it is a reminder that next year's UC health insurance options are in the process of being finalized and it is important for faculty and staff to keep their eyes open or contact their local HR offices about possible changes. It is now a year since the debacle that was the roll...

As you probably know, at the beginning of August University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise decided to rescind an offer of a tenured position to Steven Salaita formerly of Virginia Tech.   Professor Salaita had been chosen by the American Indian Studies Program last October after, as far as I can tell, passing through all of the appropriate Academic vetting processes at U of I. The offer was, as all job offers are at U of I, conditional on approval by the Board of Trustees.  For some reason, the Illinois Board does not meet to make final approval until September, after most new faculty have started their jobs.  In the interim, under conditions that remain clouded in mystery, Chancellor Wise apparently became convinced that Professor Salaita's tweets on the Israeli-Palestine conflict made him unqualified to join the faculty and she chose not to submit his name to the Board of Trustees. Chancellor Wise's latest statement on her decision can be found here . There have al...

This week has seen the thin veneer of amateurism removed from the image of the NCAA. Two separate decisions-- one by the Association and one by a Federal Judge  should make it clear that the NCAA is big business, that it depends on profiting off of its athletes while denying them fair recompense, and that its business model is fraught with legal and ethical problems.  It will take some time to see the effects of these decisions but some quick responses are offered below. 1) Yesterday Judge Claudia Wilken released a judgment in the legal case brought by Edward O'Bannon and others against the NCAA.  O'Bannon and his fellow plaintiffs argued that the NCAA acted unfairly by profiting from the use of their images and names without allowing them to share in the profits.  The NCAA argued in part that they prevented athletes from sharing in their profits because it was important for college athletics to remain "amateur" and that paying the athletes directly would under...

Higher ed policy is suffering through a long siege  of intellectual gridlock.  The default result is what I've been calling permausterity , a chronic funding shortage for public colleges that now rests on a chronic lack of confidence in the job they're doing.  This has become a vicious cycle that feeds itself.   Making matters worse, faculty responses are fragmented, when faculty respond at all.  Some of the most eloquent voices are increasingly disenchanted: William Deresiewicz got so much pushback for his recent piece,  "Don't Send your Kid to the Ivy League," in part because he seemed to be saying that even our premier universities are turning America's most successful students into mercenary sheep. (1) Why Can't College be Cheaper? Dr. Deresiewicz's piece upset many supporters of the college ideal (e.g., Jim Sleeper ), and one reason is that it seemed to lend credibility to this year's leading higher ed question: "is college worth it?...