21st Century Scholar

Last week I wrote a five part fictional series on the takeover of the CSU system by a for-profit company.  Fiction is frequently the creation of the possible.  Gatsby may not have lived, but he could have.  Huck Finn may have been the creation of Mark Twain, but many of us grew up with boys [...]

I have been thinking about Master’s degrees over the last few weeks.  I am chairing the Master’s Committee for the School again this year.  Yesterday someone also sent me an email asking for my help.  A for-profit university is starting an on-line Master’s degree in higher education and they wanted to know if I was [...]

In my last post I outlined what a for-profit is doing that seems legitimate and worthwhile.  A sticking point for me is the fragmentary work that faculty do.  For many of us, tenure is critically important to protect academic freedom.  Academic freedom enables me to speak my mind – as long as it pertains to [...]

A friend visited this weekend who was in town to offer a module for Walden University.  Walden is a primarily online, for-profit institution that offers graduate courses in various low-cost disciplines.  They don’t focus on lab-intensive graduate  programs such as chemistry or engineering, but instead offer classes leading to a degree in education, business, psychology [...]

A recent pair of articles travel in parallel universes.  On the one hand we find a management guru opining that shared governance can help colleges and universities during difficult times.  On the other hand, we have yet another report that points out that tenure is declining in all types of institutions, and that part-time faculty [...]

Anyone who quotes Kant in an oped can’t be all bad, but Mark Taylor’s recent bromide about academe is yet another in a century’s worth of mostly humanities professors telling us the academic world is going to hell in a handbasket.  Taylor chairs the religion department at Columbia and wrote a column, “End the University [...]