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Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma I find it quite striking:  The most successful unionization efforts have shifted from the traditional working class to the educated class.  At tech firms rather than in warehousing.  At Starbucks much more fruitfully than at Amazon. Among undergraduates at Kenyon College rather than at Tesla.  Yes, and among graduate students at Brown, Harvard, MIT, NYU, and, most recently, Yale. Union membership rates are  lowest  in financial activities (1.9 percent), leisure and hospitality (2.2 percent), and professional and business services (2.2 percent).  In contrast,  about 25 percent  of college faculty and staff are unionized or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Labor activism has surged at universities since 2013, adding about 120 new faculty chapters.  Prompting this gush  are hiring freezes, program cuts, enrollment declines, increasing reliance on adjunct faculty, and threats to tenure and academic freedom. Perhaps most striking is the fo

Two American college students, studying abroad in South Korea, were among the 154 people killed in a crowd surge in Seoul. One of the Americans killed was Anne Gieske of the University of Kentucky. The university's president, Eli Capilouto, in a message to his campus, said: "Anne, a nursing junior from Northern Kentucky, was studying in South Korea this semester with an education abroad program. We have two other students and a faculty member there this semester as well. They have been contacted and are safe. We have been in contact with Anne’s family and will provide whatever support we can—now and in the days ahead—as they cope with this indescribable loss." The other American killed was Steven Blesi of Kennesaw State University.. “On behalf of the entire Kennesaw State community, our thoughts and prayers go out to Steven’s family and friends as they mourn this incomprehensible loss,” said Kennesaw State President Kathy Schwaig, in a Twitter post.   Ad keywo

It’s been almost seven years since writer and public radio host Celeste Headlee gave her February 2016 TED talk, “ Ten Ways to Have a Better Conversation .” It went viral. She became an in-demand speaker. People found her methods to be highly effective. They were having better conversations and even enjoying them more. Headlee’s advice was straightforward and made up of things we hear a lot these days: be open-minded, listen more, ask open-ended questions, don’t repeat yourself, a conversation is not a self-promotional opportunity. We all need these pragmatic principles. Then the 2016 election happened, and our political and cultural divisions became even deeper. Four years later, when COVID became rampant, we became physically as well as socially isolated from each other. It was a recipe for conversational breakdown if there ever was one. Now, as we move out of COVID, no matter what great advice we get, it still seems everyone’s talking past each other. We feel the effects of i

Blog:  Beyond Transfer It has become a common refrain: the COVID-19 pandemic heightened disparities that were already present in American education. This happened in ways that should not have surprised us. But they did surprise us. Here at the Associate of Community College Trustees (ACCT) 2022 Leadership Congress currently being held in Manhattan, these key take-aways are being reinforced with increased nuance and clarity. First, many leaders were surprised to find that community colleges suffered more severe enrollment drops during the pandemic than any other higher education segment. They experienced a decline of over 11 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse . In past recessions, community colleges attracted more students, as individuals who lost their jobs returned to college to freshen their skills or retrain for new positions. (Such phenomena are termed “countercyclical enrollment increases.”) But that didn’t happen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The University of Florida Faculty Senate has voted no confidence in the selection process under which the university's board selected U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse as the next president, The Gainesville Sun reported. The Senate held an emergency meeting on the resolution, which focused just one finalist being named. Senators voted 72-16 to pass the measure. Breann Garbas, a Faculty Senate member who drafted the motion, said, “The process is the biggest problem here because we don’t know who those other candidates were. We don’t know anything about them and we have no input in this and no say in it as a faculty as a whole." The university board is expected to approve Sasse for the position on Tuesday.     Ad keywords:  executive faculty Editorial Tags:  Live Updates Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Website Headline:  No-Confidence Vote in Selection Pr

Just one day after Virginia Commonwealth University began rolling out a VCU-branded beer, the sales of which were intended to fund scholarships, the university has stopped its production indefinitely, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch . Community members expressed a range of objections to the product; a VCU professor, Everett Carpenter, raised concerns in a letter to the university’s president, Michael Rao, earlier in the week, arguing that the initiative was insensitive to the memory of Adam Oakes , a student who died of alcohol poisoning during a fraternity hazing at VCU in 2021. Carpenter also noted that a faculty and staff committee had voted against the interim policy that made it possible for the institution to release a branded beer. According to a statement the university provided to CBS 6 in Richmond, the ale—called Ram Bam, after VCU mascot Rodney the Ram—is already on shelves, but VCU will work with its brewing partner, Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, “to stop pro

Blog:  Leadership in Higher Education I am excited to share some news with you: a brand new book award! The Rodel Institute, where I serve as president and CEO, has created the Edwards Book Award, an annual prize recognizing books that make an outstanding contribution to the understanding and practice of democracy and American politics. The prize will carry an honorarium of $10,000. I hope scholars in political science, history, psychology, sociology and other fields who are doing interesting work in politics and democracy studies will nominate their books for consideration. The award is named in honor of former Congressman Mickey Edwards. Mickey has inspired generations of American public servants and students as a member of Congress, faculty member at Harvard, Princeton, and American Universities, author of highly respected books on the American political process, and founding executive director of the Rodel Fellowship, the nation's premier bipartisan leadership develo

In 1870, poet and critic James Russell Lowell asked the following question in the North American Review : Will it do to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn? It may well be doubted; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning air—a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. Lowell could have written another essay on Chaucer after 1873, when Frederick James Furnivall, founder of the Chaucer Society, revealed a 1380 legal record that named “Galfridus Chaucer” as released from charges “ de meo raptu ” (“concerning my rape”) by one Cecily Chaumpaigne. Lowell never wrote that essay, enamored as he was with Chaucer’s “invigorating” poetry. He considered him his earliest precursor, the father of English poetry and creator of literary English, powerful mythographies that have enjoyed a longue durée despite nuanced

In 2010, a book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education envisioned a wholesale shift in how people learned. More than a decade later, how has that panned out? This week’s episode features a conversation with Anya Kamenetz, the author and journalist who in 2010 tapped into an emerging set of issues around student debt, rapid technological change and political upheaval to lay out a portrait of a world in which individuals could learn when and how they wanted and be far less dependent on instructors and institutions. She discusses the current landscape and what she got right and wrong 12 years ago.  This episode was made possible by Kaplan .  Follow Us On Apple Podcasts     Google Podcasts     Stitcher     Spotify    Section:  The Key Podcast Ad keyword:  Spon_Kaplan_20221003 Event's date:  Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - 6:15pm Insider only:  from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/dKt1CST via I

Image:  Bloomfield College and Montclair State University will merge, the two institutions announced today. Their Boards of Trustees authorized the move to create Bloomfield College of Montclair State University on or before June 30, 2023. Until then, Bloomfield College will operate independently, though in close collaboration with Montclair State. Students enrolled at Bloomfield at the time of the merger will be allowed to continue their education at no additional cost, and Montclair State “will make every effort” to provide jobs for current Bloomfield employees, according to a press release announcing the news. About a year ago, Bloomfield College president Marcheta P. Evans made the frank announcement that without an institutional partner or philanthropic support, Bloomfield would be forced to close its doors. Montclair State stepped up to provide financial support until the two could finalize the merger announced today. “Bloomfield College of Montclair State Universit

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Nearly a quarter century ago, Warren Leon, the director of interpretation at Old Sturbridge Village, and Roy Rosenzweig, the Mark and Barbara Fried Chair of History and founding director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, published History Museums in the United States , a pioneering critical assessment of history museums, historic houses, historic sites and open-air living history museums. Fifteen scholars and museum staff members examined the versions of the past that these institutions offered the public and evaluated the extent to which they reflected the latest historical scholarship and incorporated the perspectives of those people—women, Blacks, Native Americans, Latino/as, immigrants and workers—whose history had previously been ignored or caricatured. Their conclusions were indeed highly critical: Financial and institutional considerations too often resulted in a bland, insipid and wishy-washy portraits of the