21st Century Scholar

Recently, a friend asked us for a loan. This is someone we have known for a long time and because of the vagaries of the stock market and a downturn in the economy he has seen his savings diminish at the same time as he lost his job. The prospects in this economy for a [...]

Last week, Governor Jerry Brown described his 2012 budget proposal, which included a $5.2 billion cut in education if voters do not approve a tax increase on the ballot this November. Of the total, Brown plans to cut $4.8 billion in K–12 public school funding—the equivalent of three weeks of schooling—and $200 million to the [...]

“Yes, we can,” exclaimed Senator Barack Obama after winning the presidential primary in South Carolina nearly four years ago. The slogan signified hope and change for a country that desperately needed it. By alluding to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, it also hinted at a promising new future for the working class and [...]

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. –John Gardner What we have seen over the last two years or so is California’s lauded systems of higher education struggling to adapt to the new fiscal realities of state funding. How have the systems responded? Although the boards, the [...]

by Randy Clemens Davis Guggenheim, the director of Waiting for Superman, said that his ultimate goal for the film was to catalyze education reform. Knowing that makes thinking about the movie a little easier for me. Why? Guggenheim is a story-teller. His credits include Melrose Place, An Inconvenient Truth, Deadwood, and Party of Five. He is not a [...]

by Bill Tierney Certain topics tend to generate a great deal of controversy. Speech codes, infringements on academic freedom, issues related to diversity and affirmative action are likely to provoke readers to respond to an article with a torrent of opinions. Other topics, however important, generate only the most pro forma of discussions. Pension reform [...]

by Bill Tierney In 1841 Horace Mann wrote that “education has a power of ministering to our personal and material wants beyond all other agencies.  Every wise parent and community, desiring the prosperity of their children, will spare no pains in giving them a generous education.”   Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century Americans were in [...]

by Yvonna S. Lincoln Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development Texas A&M University By and large, one of the few responsibilities that has been left to faculty has been the shape and structure of the curriculum.  Departments and faculties, having slowly lost ground in the stalwart fight for [...]

by Bill Tierney After our visit to Turkey last summer, we spent a few days in London before heading home.  The U.K. has as much of a deficit problem as the United States and the conservative David Cameron had just become PM.  One night we returned from a play – All My Sons – (superb!) [...]

Thanks to Mark Pelesh, Jorge Klor de Alva, Doug Burleson, and Mark De Fusco for contributing to our discussion of for-profit universities this week. We cap the week off with a post by Bill Tierney concerning revamping the California postsecondary system. Rethinking the Master Plan by Bill Tierney I co-hosted a meeting recently of a [...]