When the president named Arne Duncan as his first secretary of education, he was doing a lot more, and a lot worse, than just naming a Chicago crony and basketball buddy to a critical Cabinet position. He was adopting one of the most aggressive, least tested, top-down, pro-corporate philosophies toward education administration ever promoted in this country.

Despite clear evidence that Duncan's methods had failed to improve Chicago Public Schools by the only measure he overwhelmingly targeted (test scores), reporters from the corporate media tripped all over themselves to lavish friendly coverage on Duncan's efforts to bring the same tactics to bear on a national scale. Taking advantage of state revenue shortages, Duncan took command of a massive fiscal war chest and turned it into a reality legislation show called Race to the Top.

"Want a piece of my billions?" Duncan asked the states,...

An interesting piece in last week's Chronicle, "Goodbye to those Overpaid Professors in their Cushy Jobs," attempts a possibly premature farewell to a stereotype, the enduring myth that "college professors lead easy lives." According to reporter Ben Gose, once-rampant complaints about the imaginary prof on a three-day work week are now hard to find.

Nonetheless he notes an interesting source for some doozy "last gasps" of lazy-prof stereotypes: faculty members themselves. Gose speculates that the prof-on-prof stereotypers are trying to do the profession a favor, in the front line of faculty members "policing their own" and targeting "perceived slackers," etc.

The photograph and first third of the article are devoted to the emotional and contradictory views of Prof. John Hare, chair of English at Montgomery College in Maryland. According to Gose, Hare "became furious" at a...

Should The New York Times exist?

Ha—you're thinking, "What an unfair question!" Or "You've framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way."

And right you are. But since I'm a rich and powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in the answer, I don't care what you think, and I'm free to compound the injury by holding a false "debate" on a question that unfairly asks one side to argue for its existence.

Enter The New York Times and its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed, which just riffs on a piece reported by Robin Wilson for The Chronicle. As if framing a loaded question weren't enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways. In the more obvious manipulation of the lineup, opponents of tenure outnumber proponents 3-2.

More importantly: In a debate about the "demise" of tenure, the debate's framers don't include any voices of persons who are living the...

Joe Ramsey is a talented young scholar of the radical writing that often characterized the American cultural landscape in the first half of the last century (and which the cultural criticism of the second half largely ignored). He writes politically-relevant poetry under the name J. Gallant Ramsey. This piece on Haiti is presented here with his permission. Over one and a half million Haitians are still homeless, many of them the children of the quarter-million dead.

Fault Lines--Six Months After, July 12 (A poem reflecting on the six month anniversary of the Haitian Earthquake, and the ongoing catastrophe)

The Earth has traveled half way round the Sun

Since the day it shook and sucked them down.

Down

Down and

down

everything fell:

Shacks and hovels smashed through sewers;

Palace collapsed like an empty egg shell.

Three hundred thousand, maybe fewer

Thousands buried, never found.

A nation of...

Only way to please me
turn around and leave
and walk away
—"Alabama Getaway," lyrics by Robert Hunter

Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt's report for The Chronicle blamed "Dixie" culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who "bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."

As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All the Kings Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at...

Just last year, Stanley Fish was playing Clint Eastwood with his manifesto: Do Your Job, Punk! (or, My Tinfoil Hat Keeps Politics Out of My Teaching--Get Yours Today!) In that widely panned book, he argued that the role of the faculty was to produce and distribute knowledge magically apart from the mundane and political.

Earlier this week he more convincingly took on the student evaluation of teaching and, specifically, a Texas proposal to hold tenured faculty "more accountable" by giving faculty bonuses of up to $10,000 for earning high customer assessments of specified learning outcomes.

Fish makes two arguments against the proposal. He squanders pixels bolstering his weaker point, that students aren't necessarily in a position to judge whether Fish-as-teacher-phallus has, ugh, "planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding."

Far better is his second point:...

Let's say you teach at an M.A.-granting state school with 2,000 new first-year undergraduates entering annually. Let's further say they take half their load with faculty on part-time appointments. Controlling for other variables, one new multi-campus study suggests that this degree of contingency in faculty appointment could play a significant part in 600 students dropping out before their sophomore year.

The latest chapter (pdf) in the cautious series by Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan focuses on the critical first year in four-year institutions, following up previous efforts on community colleges and the lower division more broadly.  Their conclusion: a merely "average" degree of contingency in faculty appointments and working conditions at four-year institutions affects year-to-year student retention by as much as 30 percent:

Students with average levels of exposure to full-time,...

Across the planet for the past two years, university management has been opportunistically putting the screws to faculty, staff and students with bogus claims that "the economy made us do it." Professor of accounting and AAUP Secretary-Treasurer Howard Bunsis has made a second career of flying around North America debunking these hilariously dishonest claims, a reason Bunsis is one of my top picks for next AAUP prez.

One of the more sinister categories of administrator opportunism is program closure, and winner of 2010 Most Egregious Sleaze in that category has to be the UK's Middlesex University, which in a burst of vocationalist enthusiasm closed an active, successful philosophy program. The department was by far the top research producer in the school, according to the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and ranked 13th nationally among philosophy programs measured by the...

So when I heard Anya Kamenetz, once the passionate shoot-from-the-hip spokesperson against student debt, was reinventing herself as the passionate shoot-from-the-hip analyst of new media in education, I was prepared to give her a listen. I thought, well, at least she has enough dignity and intelligence not to turn herself into a pimpette for learn-while-you-sleep audiocassettes.

Whoa, was I wrong. She turned out a book that stays relentlessly on its Twitter-sized message: OMG! OMG! The internetz a library! (Speaking of Twitter, you can relieve your boredom with the book by following Kamenetz's real-time feed about her visits to the dentist.)

Kamenetz turns out to be an adherent of the most shopworn education fantasy in history: education without educators! Like untold generations of blatherers before her, she opines that information technology will deliver education without an...

Over at The Atlantic, business editor Megan McArdle lit up the Beltway blab-o-sphere by posing an interesting question: If "almost every" tenured professor she knows has a "left-wing vision" of workplace issues, why do they accept the "shockingly brutal" treatment of faculty with contingent appointments?

Her perception of leftism among the faculty leads her to think that our values "should result in something much more egalitarian." So, she asks, how is it that higher ed sustains "one of the most abusive labor markets in the world"?

Good question. One answer, of course, is that the faculty aren't "leftists" at all, but American liberals, whose commitments to equality are relatively clear in matters of ethnicity and gender, but hopelessly confused when it comes to class and workplace issues generally.

Arguably most of the policy failures by contemporary liberals in matters of ethnicity...