There’s a lot of meat in the 2014 High School Benchmarks Study from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and I encourage you to dive in yourself. I’m just digging into it now. I want to flag something fairly simple: in terms of both college enrollment rates immediately following high school graduation and the crucial […]
Continue reading →I’ve been banging on against the STEM shortage myth for a long time now, but this is only part of a broader argument. We’re living in an age where a lot of chin-scratching econ types a) blame people for their own unemployment on the theory that what they studied is frivolous/impractical/whatever, and b) push them […]
Continue reading →Since I’m perpetually having to answer the same questions in regards to Steven Salaita, I thought I would put together a short FAQ. Obviously, there’s no endorsement of this by Dr. Salaita, I don’t mistake this for comprehensive, and this isn’t the last word on anything. But I keep getting the identical questions and life […]
Continue reading →Whatever your broader thoughts on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (and there’s lots we can talk about), you may find this position paper of theirs on affirmative consent regulations to be useful. The nut, for me: Affirmative consent posits that sexual activity is sexual assault unless the non-initiating party’s consent is, as SB […]
Continue reading →A couple of weeks ago, I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign with activist friends of mine. We went to protest in support of Dr. Steven Salaita and the several unions and student groups who were rallying for better labor conditions, for the principle of honoring contracts, for collective bargaining rights, for recognition […]
Continue reading →Update: Via commenter Audrey Watters, it gets even better. Actual comment: “I might stream this into my Second Life class as well.”
Continue reading →The great education journalist Dana Goldstein made this point some years back, but I can’t find the piece, and it bears rewriting: while a greater percentage of black and Hispanic students fail to meet educational performance standards in this country than their white counterparts, due to the demographics of the United States, a plurality of […]
Continue reading →I could go into a whole song and dance about all my own biases and self-interest here, but I’ll just go ahead and say simply that I’ve given up on the hope that our media, particularly our digital media, will ever be anything but unremittingly hostile to our higher education system. It’s one of the […]
Continue reading →I could go through this Graeme Wood piece on Minvera, the latest in the hoary old industry of disruptive innovators disruptively innovating in education, and offer my rebuttals. Wood is so hopelessly infatuated with the Silicon Valley hero-libertarian narrative that he doesn’t even begin to question the company or its Ayn Rand-dweeb founder, Ben Nelson. […]
Continue reading →Dear Dr. Wise, I am writing to ask that you please reconsider the decision made by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to rescind an offer of employment to Dr. Steve Salaita. As an academic and a public writer, I am deeply disturbed by the consequences for intellectual and academic freedom when scholars are judged […]
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