21st Century Scholar

Today 21st Century Scholar welcomes Yvonna Lincoln as our guest blogger!  Dr. Lincoln is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Program Chair of the Higher Education Administration Program at Texas A&M University. In a move not recorded anywhere for many, many decades, the Board of Regents of the fourth largest university in the U.S. has [...]

Today’s post is by guest scholar, Yvonna S. Lincoln. About the author: Yvonna S, Lincoln is Professor of Higher Education and Educational Administration at Texas A & M University. She is author, coauthor, or editor of such books as Naturalistic Inquiry and Fourth Generation Evaluation (both with Egon G. Guba), and Organizational Theory and Inquiry. by Yvonna S. Lincoln [...]

The Corporatization of Shared Governance The most recent AAUP Online Member Newsletter reports on “The Near-Death Experience of Antioch College:  A Cautionary Tale”, and queries “What happens when a university’s corporate management betrays the institutions core educational mission;  when it abandons its key constituencies;  when it hides intentions and plans; and when it manipulated or [...]

Who’s Reading—and What? Two quiet, but momentous, revolutions are taking place in the U.S., and their combined outcome is unclear for both undergraduate and graduate students and for American life more broadly. The Nation, The American Prospect, Newsweek, and other thoughtful news periodicals have commented extensively on the first, the demise of significant daily newspapers in the [...]

The discourse around shared governance in the academy usually goes in one of two directions: (1) the faculty feel that they are not consulted, and (2) the administration feels that faculty decision-making is too slow and not ‘nimble.’  Frequently, especially now, what we hear is that faculty want to be consulted on the budget and [...]

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 [...]

About a dozen times a year a college or university president gets into trouble and the faculty senate votes no confidence.  Humboldt State is the most recent institution to vote no confidence in their president, Rollin C. Richmond. The pattern at Humboldt is depressingly familiar.  The faculty have been upset for a few years.  The [...]