One hand clapping

Does anyone still blog anymore?  I was thinking about the currently awful situation at UW Oshkosh and this old site came to mind.

join the protest!!

Come out today at noon to support state workers in front of Polk library!

We need to stop this draconian attack on our public servants! The government has to take a breath and start a real deliberative process.
We know there is a deep budget hole. Work with us to fix it, don't launch unwarranted attacks!

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Cut my pay!

If you haven't been living in a remote cave near Tora Bora for the last week, you know that our new governor has declared war on state employees in the guise of a "budget repair bill."

Scott Walker has proposed drastic cuts to our pay (don't pretend increasing the amount we pay towards health care and retirement is anything but a pay cut). As I suggested, I think that this may be a reasonable approach to deep budget crisis that we face.

However, this is mostly a smoke-screen for busting the state unions and punishing state workers.. First, the amount we are talking about is a negligible part of the state budget. Second, if he were serious, the bill wouldn't exempt unions that supported him in the last election. Third, the gratuitous attacks on state employees wouldn't be part of his rhetoric. Why does a budget repair bill declare that state employees will never have a pay increase again?

Wouldn't a real solution involve working with state employee groups to find real solutions to the problems the state faces? Wouldn't a real solution have wages and benefits as part of a larger conversation about the path we are going to take as a state?

How about a conversation about the importance of education? Does anyone seriously believe that reducing the pay of teachers, both in K-12 and at the universities, will improve the outlook for Wisconsin's students? I have had several students in my office recently tell me that they have switched out of the college of education because the outlook for being a teacher is so grim. This idea and the rhetoric that goes with it will drive more people away.

It is clear that every study that controls for education and experience shows that state employees' salary and benefits are less than those of the private sector. We make choices to work in jobs we love in spite of the lower pay. Walker wants to make that choice more difficult. Counting on finding idealistic, high quality educators who will accept the abuse heaped upon them by the governor and the legislature is a foolish bargain with our future.

I am afraid that this is only the first step towards kicking our children down the road to balance the budget. It frightens me to think about what the budget proposal will hold in just a week!

No one may be reading, but I had to say something!!

Is college students learning?

Wow, it has been a long time since a post, but here is an interesting link for anyone who is still out there. It also raises good questions about our own gen. ed. reforms:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/24/does-college-make-you-smarter?hp

Big gen ed shake-up coming

We heard about the big changes that LERT is planning for gen ed at our last department meeting.

Is everyone ready for a turf-war?

And I thought there weren't any good campus issues to blog about lately!

Censorship on campus

Welcome back everyone! It has been a nice, productive summer for me. Unfortunately, I haven't been posting on the blog. I have even been thinking of turning it off.

However, today I was glad that I haven't. Our lovely IT department has implemented a "virus prevention tool" that blocks access to all sorts of perfectly legitimate websites.

I was trying to follow a link to a blog on wordpress.com. It was blocked because of a "suspicious embedded link." I am not quite sure what that means except that I couldn't visit a completely innocuous site.

Apparently, I am then supposed to send an email to IT and tell them what my legitimate, academic reason was for visiting the site. Then, sometime in the future, they will unblock that blog for me.

I was just reading some web-commentary in passing, but this has happened to me several times. It looks more like a problem. Are viruses an excuse for broad-based exclusion of blogs?

The web is a dangerous place, but I am not sure the drastic measures which make following blog links impractical does our community any good!

Why do students study less?

Here is a great article from the Boston Globe about how little students study. The average has dropped from 24 hours a week in 1961 to 14 now.

Whether the numbers are right, we all know how little our students study. The bigger question raised by the article is about the nature of college. Having only 3 hours of class a week was premised on the notion that students would do much of the work needed on their own outside the classroom. Now that they are not doing that, should college become more like high school?

The Atlantic offers some theories. The first on their list is professor apathy. We don't want to challenge students and they don't want to be challenged.

Obviously, I haven't been posting much of late, but it still seems like a good place to post interesting links. . .

MU Dean's Search Turmoil

This is an interesting story that I have been following:  Marquette offered and then rescinded an offer of deanship, seemingly because she is gay.

It seems shameful to me and a sign of the turmoil within Catholic higher education.  It is, however, nice to be following a scandal on someone else's campus!

UW system's new growth agenda hits the press

You can read about it in the Journal-Sentinel; the latest plan promises increase in graduates by 30%.   

Do you think it stands any chance of getting real support in Madison?  I doubt it!

Should we ban laptops?

The reaction against laptops in the classroom has hit the Washington Post.  It lists professors banning laptops at George Washington U, American, William and Mary, and Virginia.

I tend to agree--too often it is clear that students are simply surfing the web or doing something else.  The bigger question is whether typing is as good for memory as writing.

I find writing notes is the best way to remember what I have read or heard.  I don't think typing does as well.

Do You Think They'll Mention She's a Professor?

The feeding frenzy over the biologist at University of Alabama -- Huntsville has been as exaggerated as we could have expected.

She even made the front page of the New York Times today.  

It is a horribly tragic event, but much of the focus is driven by the fact that she was a professor.  It is not an uncommon occurrence when something like this happens.  Should we be flattered that her profession matters so much in a case like this?

Maybe the Northwestern can refer to us all as Amy Bishops instead of Jeffrey Dahmers!

LERT evaluation process flawed?

A commenter wrote this:

How about the necessity of defining what we try to do in each class as part of the ongoing LERT reform? Since we are restricted to only three choices, I was very disappointed to have to say that I DON'T teach writing in my class, and that I DON'T teach critical analysis of concepts, etc., etc. The process seems ridiculously reductionist.

These are good questions--we looked at the descriptions as a department last month.  People were disturbed by the language that told us all that we do not teach writing in our classes.  It looked like the English department convinced LERT that only they could teach writing!

New Social Order on Campus?

The New York Times Style section has a story about the changing nature of gender relations on campus.  In it, the author describes how partying has changed because of the decreasing percentage of men on campus.

The NY Times seems to run these kinds of breathless stories about shocking changes on a fairly regular basis. The author (Seems like a man, but I can't be sure since the name is Alex) seems to be imagining how great it must be to hook up without dating.

Welcome back -- with another report of poor student preparation

Welcome back everyone.  I have been slow at posting as of late.  I haven't found a good campus issue to sink my teeth into.

Instead, I have a complaint out of Canada about decline grammar skills among freshman.  This is not a surprising phenomenon, but it is always fun to see it in the news.

Perhaps this semester, we will see the beginnings of the move toward unionization.  That should be a nice way to get the blog moving again.  Anything else?

National Textbook Rental Coming?

Barnes and Noble getting into the textbook rental business.  Read the story here.

The rental fee will be 42.5% of the new cost.  This seems worse than the used book market, but if there is a new edition, I suppose it might work.

How is our own local rental business doing?  Is it still here? 

Colleges need more accountability

The left-wing journal Democracy Now calls for more accountability in higher education.   The author argues that IT can provide the information needed to improve college performance.  

The article claims that NSSE and the CLA are going to be saviors for higher ed.  I guess the assessment gurus got to him.  Oh, wait, he is a think tank director in DC.  . . I'm sure they have.

We know all problems can be solved if only we have a rubrik!

 

Sad Statistic: Youth less educated than their parents

In the US, younger generation is less educated than their parents. A Washington Monthly Blogger highlights this information. Apparently, Germany is the only other country in the world where this is happening.

It doesn't seem to bode well for the future. . .

How's this for a bad idea?

Cash-strapped communities talk of "student tax."  Several cities in Pennsylvania look at taxing student tuition as a way to raise additional revenue.  It appears as yet unclear if it is actually legal.

I hesitate to post it, because I can imagine some of our local officials who dislike the university might find this to be a good idea. . . 

Debate over how to handle the big cuts.

The New York Times hosts an interesting forum today about the future of higher education, on the heels of the massive tuition increases in the California Universities.

The panel seems to be almost unanimous that it doesn't matter.  They seem to all think that tuition was too low in CA anyway. . . 

Are too many students going to college?

The Chronicle of Higher Education posts this discussion.

It seem particularly relevant for us, with our highest enrollment ever and a failure rate of first year students approaching 20%.

With the growing burden of college costs, is there any surprise that students are struggling?  How many students are forced down the college path without ever confronting the reality of debt and failure?