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Ivory Tower
Adjuncts Have Fewer Options Than Grad Students at University of Missouri
by Carl Kenney Adjunct professors are often treated like Walmart employees. At Walmart, those pulling the strings are most concerned with making money. Consumers flood the retail giant because of those amazing low prices. “Always…
Academic Publishing is Destined to Fail without Better Publisher-Author Partnership
by Ken Wachsberger IN THE MAY 26, 2014 issue of The Nation, Scott Sherman wrote about the precarious state of academic publishing due largely to pressures it faces, including from declining library budgets, the rise of commercial publishing…
Gentleman Scholars & The Rise of the Higher Ed Aristocracy
by Rick Perlstein Here’s a personal observation with a political thrust: if I were single, I don’t think I could handle dating a graduate student in the humanities or the social sciences. Or someone with a PhD but not a tenure-track job. Or…
New Survey Suggests Adjuncts May Be Unrealistic About Their Career Prospects
by P.D. Lesko Fasten your seat belts. There’s a new study out, the “College Graduate Employment Survey,” by Accenture. Who’s Accenture? From the company’s website: “Accenture is a global management…
Oakton CC Tells Dept. Chairs: “Limit Adjuncts’ Hours to Avoid Affordable Healthcare Act…
by Tom Robb When Henry Ford first put his Model T’s and Model A’s on the assembly line, he introduced a revolutionary concept: workers should be able to afford the cars they are making. That concept seems lost on today’s…
Combat Administrative Bloat: Require Public Colleges to Spend 80% of Revenues on Instruction
by P.D. Lesko One college president told the local newspaper that his college was lowering the number of hours per week adjunct faculty could teach from 30 to 29 for a single reason: to skirt the new federal regulations that are associated…
Is Administrative Bloat Hurting Higher Ed? Number of College Administrators Up 60 Percent from 1993
by John Hechinger J. Paul Robinson, chairman of Purdue University’s faculty senate, strode through the halls of a 10- story concrete-and-glass administrative tower. “I have no idea what these people do,” said Robinson, waving his hand…
When Faculty Can No Longer Afford To Teach: Ph.D.s on Foodstamps Center Stage in Academe
By Kristina Chew College tuition keeps going up and also the amount of debt students and their families take on. College costs more not because of professors’ salaries: The Chronicle of Higher Education says that, according to the latest…
More College Students Facing Homelessness
by Madeline Kirkpatrick Many things come to mind when one imagines the archetypal college student; chimneys of textbooks, late-night partying—er, studying, the proverbial cap-and-gown for graduation. And while few people would add the word…
Fretting About “Liberal” College Profs. & Young, Impressionable Undergrads? GOP…
by Barbara Shelley College isn’t cool on the GOP campaign trail. First we had Mitt Romney accusing President Barack Obama of hanging out, at least metaphorically, in “the faculty lounge,” a supposed bastion of liberal…