Higher education

Aim for Yale, hit a community college

I’ve been catching up on my long “saved-news-article” queue this weekend. A number in higher ed I skimmed and deleted because they either assumed Yale was all of higher education or clearly wrote from an experience almost entirely at places like Yale. It might be a service to remind reporters in summer that as you prepare “back to […]

Whither adjunct and graduate-student unions at public colleges and universities?

Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that home health-care attendants in Illinois do not have the right to form a union, or at least that any such union has no right to charge representation fees (or agency fees) from non-members. While the case gave the court the opportunity to overturn a 1977 decision that allowed agency […]

Graduations, honorary degrees, student protest, and advising students

Last week, I wrote an entry about William Bowen’s comments at the Haverford College graduation. I was there to watch my daughter graduate and kept my entry brief because spending time with family trumped any urge to pontificate. I’m back for my last week as a department chair at USF and wanted to follow up on some […]

William Bowen at Haverford commencement, May 18, 2004

Brief comments on William Bowen and Haverford College commencement

  Above, my view of William Bowen yesterday At yesterday’s Haverford College graduation, one of the honorary degree recipients was William Bowen, former president of Princeton University and longtime head of the Mellon Foundation (from 1988 to 2006). He took the opportunity to talk about the controversy at Haverford over the granting of an honorary […]

Join the Digital Inhumanities

Over the past decade, the renewed connections between digital manipulation and traditional humanities has led to a renaissance in the quantification of the unquantifiable, the digitization of the uncountable, and the encoding of the ineffable. It is high time that we encapsulate this academic movement in a term that will be broadly recognizable, attractive to […]