Formation Continue du Supérieur

By G. Rendell. Right up front . . . no, I'm not done wrestling with the question of how to teach sustainability to 21st century students.  Rather, I've gotten to the point where my initial back-of-an-envelope analysis of my answer to that question is starting to show its flaws. I need to take a step back, look again at the whole picture, rethink what the pieces are and how they fit together. The bits that I've already posted are in no danger -- the relative clarity which induced me to address them early on makes that fair to say.  But the bits that remain don't separate quite as cleanly from one another as I'd originally thought, which means that I probably haven't picked the right scheme for teasing them apart. More, a bit later. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Two of the communities I hang out in talk a lot about publishing. For academics, being published in the right places and enough times is a measure of worth. The peer review system attached to scholarly publishing is widely presumed more unbiased and less prone to the vagaries of local politics than peer evaluations of teaching, even at institutions at which student learning is more central to its mission than research. It’s also more fungible. The reputation a scholar builds for teaching tends to be a local currency. Scholarship is the currency of an entire discipline. Read more...

By Matt Reed. From yesterday’s reports, President Obama’s plan for changing how higher education is paid for is very much a mixed bag. It sounds mostly well-intended, and parts of it are quite good: I was heartened to hear an embrace of competency-based education, for example, and it’s hard to argue with the idea of allowing students with bachelor’s degrees to get aid for vocational training if they need it. A little well-timed brushing up on, say, software skills can go a long way. But with money, the devil is in the details. And I’ve already spotted one slippery devil. The plan is based mostly on “ratings” of colleges, based on their performance on a set of measures to be determined. Students who choose “better” colleges, as defined by the rating system, will be eligible for larger Pell grants and subsidized loans. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. In the fall of 1989, I was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo. I loved the job, I loved the city, I loved my apartment in downtown Buffalo and I loved my colleagues. Had I sought a career in history, I would have followed the footsteps of Ellen DuBois, the wonderful historian of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had recently departed from there for UCLA. Having decided in 1981 to get a doctorate in history, and then go to law school on my way to a career in academic administration, that trajectory was not in the cards. Just before I left Ithaca, where I was teaching, I met the man who would become my husband.  We married in August of 1991. In December I made my last trek from Buffalo back to Ithaca, pregnant with my first boy, who is now 21. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. After an emotional build-up watching video of the President’s visit to University of Buffalo, I had a wistful experience being not more than 100 yards away from him when he spoke at a Town Hall Meeting at Binghamton University.  As far as memory lane went, on the way there I observed much of the same old rural poverty that has been evident to any observer on route 96b south between Ithaca and Binghamton for the decades I have driven it.  Many of President’s proposals for higher education reform are aimed at that population. When youth make their move out of Tioga County, it is most often through the military.  Listening to him I came to understand that it is the young people from urban and rural poverty who are the focus of these reforms. When asked about predatory for-profit colleges, he described how some had preyed on military personnel and veterans in particular; this is from where his scorecard idea derives. The media would have been smart to pick up on that point rather than his comment about limiting law school education to three years. Read more...