By Tracy Mitrano. Last week I wrote about the weak points in higher education regarding advances in promoting privacy and information management. Today I would like to suggest three objectives every institution should strive to achieve to build awareness and promote good policies and best practices.
1. Reform the Family Rights Education Privacy Act (FERPA)
Congress passed FERPA in 1974. It is one of the first federal public privacy laws. Its age shows by comparison to more contemporary ones. It has no specific technical security safeguards, for example, and it famously has cost higher education much anxiety and yet not a dime. Read more...
In Defense of Public Higher Education
By Paul Stoller. In recent months waves of ignorant criticism have flooded the airwaves with a great deal of blather about the nature of higher education at public universities and colleges. Consider the case of Ohio State Representative Andrew Brenner (R) who recently suggested that public education is socialism. Other such critics have said that our colleges are much like indoctrination campus that steer our young people away from "family" values and "free market" ideology. Taking their cue from the more neoliberal wing of conservative thought, a growing group of state legislators have used the rationale of "living within our means" to cut funding for public universities and colleges. Feeling the squeeze, public universities and colleges have trimmed "unproductive" programs like philosophy, music and foreign languages, and have replaced expensive retiring professors with inexpensive temporary instructors. In some cases administrators have been compelled to retrench tenured faculty and eliminate academic departments. This sad litany of events has provoked much lamentation from a whole range of scholars including Noam Chomsky who believes that the privatization of our public universities will soon undermine the foundation of public education. More...