During my brief hiatus from teaching (the month of May), I have spent a considerable portion of my time catching up on the happenings of higher education across the country. Unfortunately, the news hasn’t much changed over the past several years. Universities are facing increasingly difficult economic circumstances, journal subscriptions are increasingly expensive, and institutes of higher education are increasingly relying on contingent faculty to teach the majority of their courses.
In response to these trying circumstances, a group of academics and administrators representing many institutions from 21 states met in January 2011 to hash out a response. The result is the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. The CFHE has been written up in many places (including ProfHacker) and the campaign’s principles speak for themselves:
Higher Education in the 21st Century must be inclusive; it should be available to and affordable for all who can benefit from and want a college education.
The curriculum for a quality 21st Century higher education must be broad and diverse.
Quality higher education in the 21st Century will require a sufficient investment in excellent faculty who have the academic freedom, terms of employment, and institutional support needed to do state-of-the-art professional work.
Quality higher education in the 21st century should incorporate technology in ways that expand opportunity and maintain quality.
Quality education in the 21st Century will require the pursuit of real efficiencies and the avoidance of false economies.
Quality higher education in the 21st Century will require substantially more public investment over current levels.
Quality higher education in the 21st century cannot be measured by a standardized, simplistic set of metrics.
In a related(ish) manner, the Modern Language Association is attempting to pass a resolution in support of educational funding for all American students–regardless of their native state. Here is the exact language of the resolution:
Resolution 2011-1
Whereas the United States Senate refused to vote on the DREAM Act, which would have granted eligible undocumented students paths to citizenship and tuition assistance, be it resolved that the MLA supports the efforts of undocumented students seeking paths to legal status by attending institutions of higher education.
If you are an MLA member, please do vote on this important resolution. Along with the DREAM Act resolution, you can vote for a new by-law that would stipulate that every MLA resolution would need a majority vote to pass as well as at least 10% of the membership to participate in the vote.
Lastly, the Joe and Rike Mansueto Library at UChicago is leading us one step closer to the singularity. Look at the video linked here.
Anything new you’ve noticed?
[Image by Flickr user David Michael Morris and used under the Creative Commons license.]
Nicholson Baker has an article titled “Why I’m a Pacifist” in May’s issue of Harper’s. In it, Baker lays out arguments for pacifism grounded in the Allies response to Hitler’s genocidal campaign. The full article is enlightening and insightful but one paragraph stands above the rest:
At a Jewish Peace Fellowship meeting in Cincinnati some years after the war, Rabbi Cronbach was asked how any pacifist could justify opposition to World War II. “War was the sustenance of Hitler,” Cronbach answered. “When the Allies began killing Germans, Hitler threatened that, for every German slain, ten Jews would be slain, and that threat was carried out. We in America are not without some responsibility for that Jewish catastrophe.”
Baker, along with several scholars he quotes, argues that the only solution to Hitler’s mania was an armistice with the Axis powers on the condition that Jewish Germans be allowed to flee the country. There is, of course, much more nuance to his argument but for the sake of brevity I ask that you read the article in its fullness.
After a brief discussion of the mounting war in Libya, the article finishes with this paragraph:
When are we going to grasp the essential truth? War never works. It never has worked. It makes everything worse. Wars must be, as Jessie Hughan wrote in 1944, renounced, rejected, declared against, over and over, “as an ineffective and inhuman means to any end, however just.” That, I would suggest, is the lesson that the pacifists of the Second World War have to teach us.
Today, 14 April 2011, is Poem In Your Pocket Day. I wrote about this noble celebration last year and I won’t add much to that post except to report what poem I am carrying: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I have several extra poems in tow so please do find me for a copy or print your own.
On Saturday, I will be attending (and briefly speaking at) the Brave New Media Conference on the campus of Harding University in Searcy, AR. The conference is hosted by the HU chapter of the Roosevelt Institute and the Harding University College of Communication. Though the subject title is new media, the conference will focus primarily on social media and how it affects our lives in and outside the academy. Topics of discussion range from pedagogy to weather to philanthropy. There’s no cost for attendance and there are a variety of subjects up for discussion. All of the talks revolve around social media and the keynote speakers come from a variety of industries and interests. It should be a good time.
My class/breakout session is called “EduPunks, Tweets, and Textbooks: Using Social Media to Fight the Commercialization of the Classroom.” Sure, the title is a bit much–especially since I recently agreed that EduPunk is dead (long live EduPunk?)–but I am looking forward to the subjects.
More information about the conference can be found on its site, schedule, twitter, or facebook. I hope to see you there.
As a bonus, the excellent Midnight Oil Coffee House is mere minutes from Harding U’s campus and will be a welcoming environment for further discussion after/between sessions.
As April 15th approaches, excitement for the release of David Foster Wallace’s new novel is growing. This morning, The Millions posted the first sentence of The Pale King. With this brief taste, some reviews, and previously published excerpts, I am awfully excited to read this novel.
Perhaps I am too much of a DFW fan to accurately analyze the coming work, but I find this sentence to be breathtaking. In one (albeit rather long) sentence, he wraps up a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge in an accurate description of a mid-western American landscape. Tax day can’t come soon enough.
While I have been trying to avoid the fetishization of DFW since his too-early death, I cannot resist re-posting these first lines:
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
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