Posts Tagged: higher education

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Sarah M. Sala

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“A poem is like a vision test—its vision is either clear or it’s not.”

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What Would a Woman of Color Do?

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How do we transcend generations of trauma and let go of our burdensome past?

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This Thing of Existence: Talking with Rion Amilcar Scott

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Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #153: Julie Schumacher

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“I have to confess here that I never studied Shakespeare in college.”

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How to Steal a Frozen Burrito

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If you ask me why I did it, I can’t give you a proper answer. I was hungry and didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t like I was homeless or went to sleep starving.

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What to Read When You Want to Go to College

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College is a rite of passage for many young people, and it’s also a part of the American Dream for many families. Here is a list of books that tackle those fraught four years.

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The Ladies’ University Experience

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Donna Drucker writes for Notches on the Dean of Women’s Office at Purdue University. The Dean of Women’s Office was the late 1960s predecessor to the university’s modern-day Dean of Students role. In her piece, Drucker looks at the period-specific complaints and concerns registered by female students, and how the office addressed a wide range […]

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GOP Candidate Would Censor Free Speech at Universities

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Tenured professors might soon be a thing of the past, and that could prove particularly frightening if one Republican presidential candidate gets a hold of the Department of Education. Tenure protections were created in order to foster original thinking on university campuses and protect academic researchers from censorship. But a Ben Carson presidency would see […]

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The Summer Melt Phenomenon

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Kate McGee, a reporter for Austin’s NPR affiliate KUT, recently completed on a summer-long series titled The Months Between. The series followed three Central Texas graduating high school seniors to chronicle the phenomenon of “summer melt,” where college-bound grads (often low-income minority students) never end up attending college. All episodes of The Months Between, as […]

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A College Education, Measured and Graded and Ranked and Weighed

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The [Department of Education’s] report states: “In today’s world, college is not a luxury that only some Americans can afford to enjoy; it is an economic, civic, and personal necessity for all Americans.” Most defenders of the liberal arts would agree with that statement. And yet the report does not elaborate why college is a […]

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Rising Costs, Failing Students

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Colleges and universities cannot be expected to solve America’s problems of inequity. They cannot repair broken families, or make up for learning deficits incurred early in childhood, or “level the playing field” for students with inadequate preparation. But they should be expected to try to mitigate these problems rather than worsen them—and one main reason […]

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Stop Measuring the Humanities with Dollar Signs

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Even though liberal arts degrees are actually good for business, Matt Burriesci (author of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World) believes that supporters of the humanities should lay that argument to rest: A liberal arts education … may not teach you how to change your oil […]

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We Shall Not Ban Comics in English Class!

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Recently, Tara Shultz, a college student at Crafton Hills College, expressed her shock and disgust at the “pornographic and violent” content in the selection of graphic novels (Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi) used in her English class and called upon the university to excise the texts from the curriculum. Thankfully, it seems like […]

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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother

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“That’s the anthem I would have sung at my original graduation if the university had stayed open,” my mother said.

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Our Part-Time Labor Problem

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I teach part-time. My students work. They work in fast food or slightly slower food or hospitality. Last spring semester, two were veterans, with at least four trips to the Middle East between them. One of my four parents cut her hours short to race to my class. Every time my students do not learn […]

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Professors Are the Canary in the Coal Mine

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Though plenty of adjunct professors still teach students, the full-time, tenured, middle-class professor position is nearing extinction. Adjunct professors are paid at wages below the poverty line while the costs of the career—attending conferences, performing research, accessing academic databases—continue to rise. Sarah Kendzior at AlterNet explains why underpaid adjunct faculty is a sign of a greater problem: […]

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Required Ideology in College Admissions

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The Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has added a new test to their admissions process. Prospective students are more likely to be admitted to the school if they prove that they are “confident” that they can “control” their own fates: Students who answer in ways that suggest that they are confident they can control their fates—or […]

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Art Doesn’t Pay

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The arts don’t pay very well, and working as a professional in a creative field like writing, music, or film has grown more precarious. High student debt doesn’t help, but it might explain why almost a quarter of arts graduates end up in business management. Of working artists, 40% don’t have bachelors degrees. The organization […]

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Adjunct Faculty Plan Walk Out

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Adjunct college faculty are at last taking a stand against abominable work conditions and low pay by planning a national walk out on February 25, 2015. Unlike their tenured counterparts, adjuncts lack protection from retributive firing should they follow through. Since 1975, the percent of adjunct faculty has risen from 21% of the workforce to […]

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Telling Digital Stories in the Classroom

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A communications law professor offers this tale of integrating digital storytelling in the classroom: After all, we tell our students in courses focusing on skills that online tools are excellent opportunities to engage in some fantastic storytelling. Why not encourage students to use those tools to tell the stories of communication history, theory, sociology or, […]

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