I just read a piece in the New York Times called “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously.” According to a recent study, automated software can grades essays with “virtually identical levels of accuracy,” as human graders but at a rate of 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. It sounds scary, and you can imagine the evil administrative imagination dreaming of a college system run by a handful of professors and a legion of robots. Robots don’t want health care and won’t demand freedom of speech protections.

This is also good news to Conservatives who suspect that English professors are not doing anything very difficult. Only it’s not, really, unless you are really cynical about how far we might go in denaturing…

In reality, instructors off the tenure track account for more than four-fifths of the faculties of two-year public colleges, more than two-thirds of the faculties at private four-year colleges, and more than half of the faculties at public four-year colleges.

“Accreditation Is Eyed as a Means to Aid Adjuncts,” Peter Schmidt

This ought to be a shocking statistic for anyone who works for a living. Academia used to be the cutting edge of employment standards in many ways; it didn’t always pay well to be a teacher but you did have some job security and benefits.  One problem is that the language is so obtuse; “off the tenure track,” means, by and large, part-time workers who can be fired at will. Imagine we…

It’s always good to see an end of the year piece in the Chronicle (“The Crisis of the Public University” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes) acknowledging the ongoing realities of higher education as well as its current crises.  Scheper-Hughes offers a succinct outline of  recent history and its impact on the public university system with one glaring and telling exception: she underplays the complacency of tenured and tenure track faculty.

It’s one thing to support the Occupy movement and to decry the invasion of consumerism into the university and the rising costs of education and expanding student debt. That’s the sort of thing you might expect, especially in California.  We can only hope that this sort of resistance spreads elsewhere in the United States. It’s also…

I think one of my favorite more or less recent ideas is Allan Greenspan’s ‘s “irrational exuberance.“  It sums up both the era of Regan inspirited market craziness and the blooming of the internet. Hyperbole has been the order of the day. More and more, though, the bloom is off that rose. One sign might be the defeat of the “personhood” amendment in Mississippi and the striking down of the anti-union laws in Ohio.

Maybe I am being over optimistic but I suspect that the worst of the decades long  right-wing storm has passed. Another sign, I think, that the age of irrational exuberance is over is the increasing awareness of class privilege in…

It seems pretty obvious that posting professor salaries online, as Florida Governor Scott has done (“Posting of profs’ salaries online draws scrutiny“) is an act of aggression against what he no doubt sees as his natural enemies in the academy. It’s part of a long-term campaign to disparage public employees, and, no doubt further weaken academic freedom of speech and tenure.

The governor fails to mention, of course, that the majority of teachers are either adjuncts or part-time. The salaries don’t seem particularly exorbitant, either, and are below the national average. As the article notes, too, the information is inaccurate in some cases, because the highest paid professors are not professors, they are administrators, like Neil Fenske, who’s paid…

The politics of the recession is like a long, slow pendulum swing, wiping out all sorts of hard-won gains until it reaches a peak and then (hopefully) reverses direction. There’s no guarantee that the return swing is going to restore everything, though. If the last three decades are any indication, we’ll never get back to the original starting point. The losses seem to go on and on.

“Faculty Fears in Washington” offers a catalog of some of the worst of the ongoing destruction attributed to the recession and suggests that the pendulum has yet to reach its full height. In university level education, the main targets of opportunity now seem to be tenure, on the one hand, and…