Category: Political Economy of higher education
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The story is here. I think there are two things to note here: 1: the threat to jobs of our colleagues: "The head of the University of Maine System said Friday that further state budget cuts could force the system to shed 95 jobs, on top of its plan to eliminate 165 in the next…
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Friend of the blog and brilliant neurofeminist researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young asks people to visit this petition site in support of her distinguished colleagues Carol Vance and Kim Hopper. That bell tolling you hear, where if you don't bring in 80% of your salary in grants, you're fired even after 25+ years of superb work? It's for you too,…
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Discussion on FB of this post at Leiter Reports about rejection led me to remark: I hesitate to say this, since I made it through the wars by dint of being married to the right person, but here goes. My wife likes to say "you can't take rejection personally; there are too many factors involved…
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There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher…
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In his critique of Posner’s economic analysis of law, the late Ed Baker offers some remarks that might help us to understand current developments in educational policy. Posner defends what we will now recognize as a number of the core commitments of neoliberal policy, in particular the fundamental efficiency of markets and the price mechanism…
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This article in Dissent is a good call for action, focusing on the University of Illinois-Chicago strike last week. However, one additional factor needs to be put into the equation: undergraduate student-workers, who do lots and lots of service and clerical work: checking books out of the library, answering phones in department offices, and on and…
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Article in Jacobin here: On February 18, the tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who make up the University of Illinois-Chicago faculty union UICUF Local 6456 will walk out of the classroom and onto the picket line for a two-day strike. Barring a dramatic change-of-heart by university administrators at the bargaining table the weekend, it will…
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This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of…
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This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry. These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation. Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money. An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a…
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Taking off from a Facebook discussion on US high school philosophy programs, I thought I would propose an open thread asking for comments and / or links to programs. Here's a start, to PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), and to the APA's committee on Pre-College Teaching, and to their page "So you want to teach pre-college…
New APPS 