Blog
The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of PASSHE
Editor’s Note: In 1948 the USSR announced a centralized plan to alter the environment. Like most of the Soviet Union’s grandiose plans, it ultimately failed.
Perhaps you’ve seen the Chancellor’s latest on “PASSHE Transformation?” It’s amazing how a document so short on details can still manage to rankle. The very notion that students and faculty will be transformed is enough to disturb, but its implicit anti-intellectual message really vexes. It’s hard to ignore the presumptuousness that could lead some to conclude that “transformation” is necessary or, even worse, that they somehow singlehandedly possess the knowledge of what that transformation ought to be and that it should be imposed from above. read more…
Ravitch, Gates & What Education Is, with thread to WS
[Ed’s note: we’d blog about retrenchment, but as it’s Nov. 30th, the day before one of the deadlines for retrenchment letters to go to faculty as defined by the CBA, we thought we’d wait and see what tomorrow brings…fingers crossed. Four schools (KU, Mans, ESU & Ship) have open “we may need to retrench” notices to the union, so they are the possibilities for tomorrow. Let’s hope there are no more letters…]
Ken frequently enough chides me for being uncool — often in reference to my understanding the point of media like this one. But I think the point of this kind of medium is to pull together random thoughts and put them out there for the audience.
This post will try to pull disparate thoughts together, all on the theme of defining education. read more…
What we’re thankful for…2010
In keeping with the season, we thought we’d do our own little Thanksgiving list:
We’re thankful for the staff at APSCUF.
We’re thankful we aren’t public university faculty in New Jersey, where we’d have to figure out which 7 days we weren’t working & not getting paid.
We’re thankful there’s a Holiday Inn East in Harrisburg.
We’re thankful there’s another election in two years.
We’re thankful there’s turkey & trimming on Thursday.
We’re thankful for all the union activists who make APSCUF run.
We’re thankful Verizon is going to offer iPads, too.
Tea for textbooks
Yesterday Ken and I had lunch in Harrisburg. That’s not terribly unusual, or blog-worthy. But yesterday we were joined by a couple of faculty members from private universities, who were in town and we took the opportunity to have lunch and talk about faculty issues across the state.
Over and over during the course of lunch the four of us kept returning to our concern du jour — the passing last week of the “Textbook Bill”. If you missed it, this piece of legislation was one of the 21 different pieces collected together in House Bill 101, known as the Omnibus School Code Bill, and was passed last week over Governor Rendell’s veto. (for reference, here is the text) read more…
The PASSHE Prevarication
Who exactly is responsible for retrenchment? Is it the state government, whose officials have not adequately funded the state system? Is it PASSHE’s Board of Governors who refuse to raise tuition despite evidence that tuition is needed to keep the Universities properly functioning? Is it the fault of the Universities’ managers who seemingly have some unacademic and odd priorities and who made some rather strange decisions? Is it the fault of PASSHE officials who encourage those managers to use budget assumptions not grounded in reality? If you’re a PASSHE official, the answer is none of the above. Who is the PASSHE scapegoat? The faculty! read more…