…When the case was argued in January, the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to say that forcing public workers to support unions they had declined to join violates the First Amendment.
But the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February changed the balance of power in the case, which was brought by California public schoolteachers who chose not to join unions and objected to paying for the unions’ collective bargaining activities on their behalf….
Colleges Spending Millions to Deal With Sexual Misconduct Complaints (NYT)
…Recently, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, resigned when it became public that he had been disciplined for sexually harassing his executive assistant, yet he had been allowed to remain on the job. The dean apologized, though he later disputed the circumstances of the case.
And the captain of Yale’s basketball team was expelled in February after a confidential school proceeding found that he had nonconsensual sex with a female student, according to his lawyer. But the lawyer said that the former player maintained that the woman had consented….
Why I’m Sticking to My ‘Noncompliant’ Learning Outcomes (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
…My chairman initially offered me several sets of "compliant" student-learning outcomes from genetics-laboratory courses at other institutions: "Manipulate the fruit fly as a genetic research organism, perform hands-on laboratory skills such as gel electrophoresis, graph data in excel software." I could easily have pasted any of those sets of bullet points into my syllabus and been done with it.
But such trivialities are not learning outcomes toward which I teach, and it would have been a misrepresentation of Genetics 305L at the College of Charleston to imply otherwise. Woodrow Wilson and I understand higher education to be, well, higher.
In the liberal-arts tradition, our business is to impart the right thought of the world, not drill our students in bullet-point lists of banalities….
…My chairman initially offered me several sets of "compliant" student-learning outcomes from genetics-laboratory courses at other institutions: "Manipulate the fruit fly as a genetic research organism, perform hands-on laboratory skills such as gel electrophoresis, graph data in excel software." I could easily have pasted any of those sets of bullet points into my syllabus and been done with it.
But such trivialities are not learning outcomes toward which I teach, and it would have been a misrepresentation of Genetics 305L at the College of Charleston to imply otherwise. Woodrow Wilson and I understand higher education to be, well, higher.
In the liberal-arts tradition, our business is to impart the right thought of the world, not drill our students in bullet-point lists of banalities….
