Dear Commons Community,

I hope all of you are enjoying the Labor Day weekend.  In yesterday’s NY Times Book Review, there was an essay entitled, End of Tenure by Christopher Shea who writes for the Boston Globe. It raises several issues related to higher education including costs, tenure, teaching load, research v. teaching, etc.  He references two books: Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist, and  Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities .   The last paragraph in the essay is most insightful:

“the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality “

Lots here for us academics in public universities.  The complete essay is available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html?ref=books

Tony