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Blog:  Just Visiting I see we are in another cycle of concern for the academic humanities, this time triggered by a long article in the  New Yorker  by Nathan Heller titled “The End of the English Major.” Heller covers a lot of ground , and none of it will be novel (pardon the pun) to people who read a publication called  Inside Higher Ed .  One of the benefits of having been writing in this space for such a long time is that I can go to my own archives over these evergreen issues and see what I’ve had to say.  I see a piece from 2016  predicated on the decline of the number of humanities faculty in which I suggested that the humanities will not be killed as long as humans remain, but the academy may cease to become a good home for them.  I would call it prescient except noting the obvious doesn’t qualify as prescience. We shouldn’t be surprised that the decline in humanities faculty has led to a decline in humanities majors. Turn your workforce into a bunch of precariousl

Blog:  Just Explain It to Me! On numerous occasions I’ve been asked, “How do you know that? I read on the internet….” And I’ve heard and overheard, “Did you know (fill in the blank with some crazy conspiracy theory).” Worse, some politicians want to dictate and police what can be taught as fact and what people are allowed to know. To say I’m frustrated or mad would be an understatement. If someone could read the cartoon thought bubble hovering above my head, it would read, “What the ever-living %&*#!” And now, I ask my higher ed colleagues, “What are we doing? What. Are. We. Doing?” If nothing else, higher education must teach people how to know shit from Shinola, fact from fiction, and truth from lore. Yep. How we know and why we should know something is as important as what we know. It comes down to the discipline people often target for elimination when there is a deficit budget. Philosophy (Epistemology, Ethics, Ontology, Semiotics, etc.). Perhaps more pointedly, wha

The Education Department’s latest version of the federal regulations that allow borrowers to apply for relief if their college or university misled them “threatens to irreparably harm the American education system,” a new lawsuit argues. Career Colleges & Schools of Texas, an association representing career education institutions in the state, is asking a Texas federal judge to declare the borrower defense to repayment rule unlawful. The association argues in its 85-page complaint that the rule violates the law by depriving institutions of due process protections and that the administration failed to meaningfully consider all the comments it received. The Biden administration has discharged $17.2 billion in student loans via borrower-defense claims and a class action lawsuit, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s student loan forgiveness tracker. The lawsuit was filed on the same day that the administration is defending its signature loan forgiveness program in th

Column:  Letters to the Editor To the Editor: Measures of quality in online education have been developed through decades of research in the field of instructional design and technology (IDT), informing best practices in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of contemporary online courses and programs. Your recent article,  “Online Classes Surge at Virginia Tech. But What About Outcomes?” by Susan D'Agostino, calls into question the quality of the online courses featured in the piece. Unfortunately, this article contains notable misconceptions about online education in general as well as misunderstandings about strategies for measuring the effectiveness of these courses. It is hoped that the opportunity to highlight these issues and share relevant, evidence-based resources from the IDT knowledge base may inform future publications which feature the topic of quality in online education. First, the author labels the courses featured in this article “ma

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma In his autobiography, Mark Twain describes how he received word, out of the blue, that his favorite daughter had died.  “I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, ‘Susy was peacefully released today.’”  The great humorist later wrote:  “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Susy, who, at the time of her death, was 24 years and five months old, had been, to her parents, “our wonder and our worship.” Twain went on living, but never really recovered from the blow.  He would spend years “trying to search out the hidden meanings of the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence” – to no avail, baffled and mocked by life’s cruelty. Human life is suffused with pointless, undeserved suffering.  No one ultimately escapes suffering that is unmerited, unwarranted, unearned, unjustified, and

Most people don’t get accreditation. That’s OK. Most people don’t need to. But for all the students, parents and policy makers calling for a higher education reboot, know this—accreditation is one of the most powerful levers we’ve got to change what we don’t like about today’s higher ed. It’s one of our best ways to assure equity for students, quality programs and innovative new models. Accreditation naysayers don’t understand today’s accreditation . I know: I was one of them. For 30 years as a college vice president and president, I was on the receiving end of accreditation. In fact, in my third year of the presidency, the college I’d been brought in to turn around was given a financial warning by our accreditors. After running large operating deficits for years, the college now risked losing accreditation. At the time, it felt like the accreditors were making it that much more challenging for us to succeed. Their very public action made it hard to convince students to come to ou

Blog:  Learning Innovation The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America by Philip Bump Published in January 2023 Why are so many conversations about the future of higher education so pessimistic? Together, we could list many reasons to worry about the future of higher education. We might mention public disinvestment, student debt and stubbornly low graduation rates. Or we could talk about the mismatch between the supply and demand for tenure-track faculty roles and the growing proportion of all teaching done by contingent and adjunct faculty. While all of the above worries about the future of higher education are valid, they each share a common underlying source—demography. The university system that we have today was mainly built to serve the generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964, otherwise known as the baby boom. What proportion of buildings on your campus were built to teach and house the students of this generation? How

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Ours is the golden age of creative nonfiction – a genre that recounts personal stories, memories, experiences, and observations using the literary techniques typically associated with fiction – voice, style, language, imagery, narrative, and more.   Personal essays written with grace and literary flair aren’t, of course, new.  Montaigne’s 16 th  century  Essais  certainly put the lie to any sense that creative nonfiction represents something novel or original.  Montaigne’s writings constitute a literary self-portrait of the essayist’s inner life, exploring topics as wide-ranging as cannibalism, childrearing, politeness, repentance, and suicide  By combining the historical, the philosophical, the topical, and the intensely personal (including his naps and bowel movements), he invented a new literary form, one that dominates writing in our time. Creative nonfiction is manifest especially vividly in  The New York Times ’s popular Modern Love column – with

Image:  Six months after President Biden announced his plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for eligible Americans, the administration will defend that plan in the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The legal fight could doom the debt-relief plan and also curtail the authority of the executive branch, depending on the final opinion. At issue will be whether the administration has the authority to forgive the loans and whether the plaintiffs who challenged the plan have standing to sue.  Michael Brickman, who worked at the Education Department during the Trump administration and is now an adjunct fellow at American Enterprises Institute, a right-leaning think tank, expects the Supreme Court to strike down the program, but he said he’ll be looking to see if the justices weigh in more broadly on the rules proposed by the Education Department and other federal agencies that he and others think go beyond the department's statutory authority.  “There's no questio