mortiz055

I'm sure 2014 in higher ed was different from 2013, but right off I can't think of how.  The nation continued its permanent public university austerity program , encouraged  flimsy hopes for ed-tech rescues , conducted long political arguments over possible 2-percent revenue increases, fantasized about self-unbundling into flexi-modularity , and proclaimed indignant doubts about the educational value of going to college at all.  So what was new? Even my biggest stayed the same, which I called the " hardening of the downward definition of public higher education through budgetary means, with no public debate."   Cheer up, I said to myself--it's the holidays! Santa Barbara's one day of winter rain has already come and gone. Some new things did happen in 2014 higher ed, and some of them were good. 1. The College Liberation Movement.   The splashy version came from some Ivy League humanist dissidents who described elite private universities as sorting machine...

  by Matthew Dennis, Professor of History and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon After a year of negotiations, the Graduate Teaching Fellowship Federation (GTFF) at the University of Oregon went on strike last week over the University's refusal to grant two weeks of automatically granted sick leave for illness or childbirth.  Kaitlin Mulhere has a good overview at "Inside Higher Ed." UO's faculty senate passed a r esolution criticizing the administration's handling of the strike , focusing in part on admin's plan to bypass TA grading   in a way that would weaken academic standards "by administrative fiat."  The UO faculty senate is now investigating this issue. The grad strike coincides with a conflict between UO faculty and its Board of Trustees (pictured above) over faculty governance. The Board is planning to change 70 policies at its meeting this week, and some major changes in the UO Constitution have been proposed by the Board chair. ...