Yawper

The prophet of the greatest American virtue warned us.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the essay Self-Reliance, wrote that, there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that… no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given […]

The Albany Times Union this weekend ran two, intrinsically linked, stories.  Playing to suit, the Times Union failed to make the connection. In the first story, the Times Union reported that New York taxpayer contributions to public employee pensions have risen another 11 to 12 percent over the prior year.  The lavish public employee pension […]

Ongoing budgetary problems have exasperated an old higher education debate, that is, what is the mission of a college or university? The traditional line of demarcation, neatly fitting between the college and university, is that of research versus teaching.  As fascinating as that debate may be, it is secondary to the balance between academic and […]

The beauty of pessimism is that it is usually vindicated in the short-term.  The next best thing about pessimism is that if things turn out well you can take credit for having sounded the alarm, thus enabling a course change. For some time I have been pessimistic about the future of higher education.  On this […]

Nancy Zimpher, Ph.D in teacher education and Chancellor of the 64 campus State University of New York (SUNY) said at a recent budget hearing on higher education that 53 percent of New York high school graduates are not “college ready.”  A full 77 percent of graduates from a New York City high school are “college […]