Two fundamental confusions over tenure and academic freedom
Two stories this morning Inside Higher Ed highlight basic confusions many have about tenure and academic freedom, respectively. Tenure protects miscreants. Wharton emeritus L. Scott Ward was finally fired after a third arrest for pedophilia-related charges. Over several Penn administrations, Ward had been untouched. Uh, er, not fired. We don’t know whether there was any […]
Charles Miller’s colloquy on CHE: dodging the market debate
Charles Miller appeared for a Chronicle of Higher Ed live chat about the Spellings Commission, and there were three–not just the one asked by me, but three–questions about markets and higher education. Here are his responses, with my annotations in brackets: That’s a very broad and important question and deserves a better answer than I […]
Distance-learning tools
It’s the start of the semester, and I’ve given up on using CMap‘s collaborative concept-mapping in my online class this semester. Ah, well. I’ve at least figured out a package of cool tools to use instead. USF uses Blackboard, which would be a very clunky tool indeed except for a few other side apps. One […]
Disabled-student vouchers fraud in Florida
Chavon Peoples, former administrator of Success Academy in Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested Wednesday in connection with charges that she defrauded the state of $400,000 by claiming that prospective or former students were attending the school on disabled-student vouchers when they were really in public schools. (See the short AP story from the St. Pete Times […]
Flag flap in Denver
A Colorado teacher was suspended this week for displaying foreign flags in a geography class. Colorado law says you can’t display another country’s flag on a public building, but there’s an exception for transitory displays for educational purposes. Geography teachers can’t display flags? A day later, the district reversed itself. Something tells me the administration […]