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    Category: Academic freedom

    • Adjunctification (again) and How (not) to Fix It (again)

      There’s a new piece up at The Atlantic by Elizabeth Segran on the adjunct crisis in U.S. Higher Ed and the growing movement to contest the situation. The piece has a number of helpful aspects, including providing a summary of some of the most recent research on the effects of adjunctification on faculty, students, and the…

    • As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation: A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine

      “Whenever you have a 'southern' or a 'northern' or an 'eastern' or a 'western' before an institution's name, you know it will be wildly underfunded." –Richard Russo On March nineteenth the Chancellor of the University of Maine System, as well as the President, and select members of the Board of Trustees gathered in front of…

    • Bad Economics/Economists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

      My friend Alan Nelson recently posted a link on facebook to the following article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/business/economic-view-when-the-scientist-is-also-a-philosopher.html with an appropriately snarky note that the author, N. Gregory Mankiw (the Chair of the econ department at Harvard, natch), seemed to be arguing that the only changes to the status quo permissible are those that are verifiably Perato efficient…

    • Excellence, Schmexcellence Part IV*: an attempt to be clearer about the main problems with assessment.

      In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people. First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and…

    • Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

      Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them? It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve…

    • If I worked at The University of Kansas, this post might get me fired

      Why? Well, because this post is about the Kansas Regents' decision to pass a new social media policy, which states that: the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media. Improper use means making a communication…

    • My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

      A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…

    • More Good News on the Whole Robot Overlord Front

      Nice article in today's NY Times here about MOOCs not doing all that Thomas Friedman (cf. his entirely predictably earlier puff piece) had quite hoped. If the links don't work, just reset your browser history and they will open up. Here's a nice bit: But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access…

    • Why do we (academics) blog?

      Last week the Guardian had an interesting piece on academic blogging. The authors, academic bloggers themselves, conducted a small-scale study with 100 academic blogs as their sample set, in order to identify the main trends in what academic bloggers really write about. It is often said that blogging is an outreach/impact tool for academics, to…

    • The donor intent of strategic philanthropic investors must be protected

      Quite a morning on Facebook. First, someone posted a link to this NDPR review, which prompted this reflection on my part:  The choice of doing a review or not on Objectivism entails a bit of a double-bind: "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (or less obnoxiously, "let's let the marketplace of ideas* do its work") vs…