Daniel Luzer

The NBC show “Community,” the highly entertaining program about Greendale Community College, a fictional community college in Colorado, was controversial at first. Community college administrators, not a group generally defined by its sense of humor, worried that a comedy about community college would involve a lot of making fun of community colleges. This worry was […]

The University of California, struggling over funding shortages this year, looks a little different. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the university system is looking to make up the shortage in state funding by enrolling students who can pay more. As Larry Gordon explains: More than 8% of UC’s projected 37,151 freshmen […]

Yea, no one was listening. On July 8 the New York Times ran an article by Sam Dillon under the attention-grabbing headline “Colleges Spend More on Recreation Than Class.” This was an interesting revelation and lots of people, including, well me, wrote about this enthusiastically. Scandal! Well a scandal it may be, but it’s actually […]

Does this mean we’re doing something right? College attendance rates are higher than ever. According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Over the last generation, students of all racial and ethnic groups increased their college-going rates by double-digit percentage points, and also increasingly went directly from high school to college, according to […]

This doesn’t actually seem mathematically possible but apparently eccentric academic Joan Ginther of Las Vegas, Nev. won $10 million last month playing the lottery in the Texas. That’s lucky. But that’s not all. According to an Associated Press article article in the Washington Times: It was the fourth winning ticket in Texas for the 63-year-old […]

Democratic senator Tom Harkin appears to be leading a battle against for-profit colleges. Chairman of the Senate’s committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), Harkin led the discussion when the committee began its for-profit investigation on June 24. He’s continuing the fight. On Tuesday he wrote in an op-ed the Los Angeles Times that, […]

Colleges need to “rethink their missions,” said Virginia’s governor, Republican Bob McDonnell. According to an article by Karin Kapsidelis in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: A combination of state resources and internal restructuring will be required to improve access and affordability, McDonnell said after meeting with his Commission on Higher Education Reform, Innovation and Investment. “Not every […]

Sometimes it seems like one can’t go anywhere without running into three or four “intellectual” takes on The Simpsons, the now 21-year old Fox animated sitcom. There’s a reason for this. In USA Today’s Pop Candy Denise Du Vernay, who has taught a Simpsons-based English composition class at the Milwaukee School of Engineering for 10 […]

Schools and the media have lately gotten all worked up about the dreadful, epic academic dishonestly going on in the Republic’s hallowed institutions of higher learning. The worry, of course, is about students cheating, not professors. Let’s find a way to stop to those bad students, perhaps by using expensive private companies. But as one […]

The nation’s state universities were founded under auspices of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 for the specific purpose of teaching “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts” at low cost. Now not only are state universities becoming more expensive every year, apparently they’re having a little trouble […]