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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

Blog:  Leadership in Higher Education This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases challenging the use of race as a factor in college admissions.  The defendants in the cases are Harvard and the University of North Carolina.  Virtually all Constitutional experts, myself included, believe that when the Court releases its decisions in spring of 2023, it will eliminate affirmative action by a 6-2 majority (with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused from participation in the Harvard case). Because Harvard is a private institution and UNC public, that result would ban use of race in admission decisions across the entire spectrum of higher education. Many of my friends and colleagues in higher education have questions about these cases. Here’s my analysis: The Legal Context In Grutter v. Bollinger, a case from 2003, the Supreme Court approved the use of race as a factor in college admission in order to produce a diverse student body. Ordinarily, the C

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:  Learning Innovation Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life by Margaret Sullivan Published in October 2022 Quick, name five things that academia and journalism have in common. My list would include the following: Undergoing a painful, unnerving and often exciting industrywide transition from analog to digital. Vital elements of a functioning democratic system that are under attack by antidemocratic forces. Real worries about the long-term financial viability of our industries as currently constructed. Populated by mission-driven and values-based people who entered the profession as something of a calling. Navigating a challenging new reality of big tech competition, partnership and control. These commonalities between academia and journalism, universities and print/digital publications, provide all the motivation required to recommend Newsroom Confidential to our Inside Higher Ed community. Reading about the inner workings an

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

Is A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures —an interactive, open-access, born-digital monograph developed by Brown University Digital Publications and published in August by MIT Press —the monograph of the future? Asking readers to imagine Islam anew, as a vast web of interconnected traces seen through the prism of time, the book opens with a networked table of contents. Portals lead to different time periods across different parts of the world, inviting readers to explore Islam via a path of their choosing. In designing a one-of-a-kind trajectory that follows their own interests and queries, the reader, effectively, creates their own journey while traversing the world of ideas and evidence that has been curated by the author. This groundbreaking interface, says author Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown, “performs, rather than simply states, the book’s argument—namely, that we see pasts and futures as fields of unlimited possibility that come aliv

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

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Seattle Pacific University against the Washington State attorney general for investigating its employment practices. Judge Robert Bryan ruled that Seattle Pacific is asking for a change in state law that a federal court cannot grant, KING 5 News reported. He also said any First Amendment arguments by Seattle Pacific should be raised in state court. Attorney General Bob Ferguson has been investigating whether Seattle Pacific's acknowledged discrimination against gay people in hiring violates state law. Ferguson said, " Instead of answering questions about its hiring process, the university filed a federal lawsuit arguing that it is above the law to such an extraordinary degree that my office cannot even send it a letter asking for information about its employment policies. Today, a federal judge appropriately rejected that extreme position." The university has maintained that the investigation violates its rights as a rel

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