students feeling unacknowledged, silenced, and oppressed by their colleges and universities. These protests are not merely symbolic demonstrations of collective unhappiness, but are larger critiques about national issues, such as racism, by students demanding institutional action and accountability. Student and university clashes are not new. In the 1960s, American college students held acts of resistance as part of the Civil Rights Movement; in the 1980s to call on universities to divest from corporations On November 9, 2015, the University of Missouri’s president and chancellor announced their resignations in the midst of growing media coverage of student activism calling attention to issues of campus racism and diversity.1 While UM’s student protests gained national headlines, student resistance across the nation has surged since 2014, as students protest, demonstrate, and sit-in and die-in against racism on their campuses, and around the broader and parallel issues of
surrounding the value of higher education is redefining the nature of a college education.1 No other policy area best epitomizes these changes than the expansion of dual enrollment programs. At its most elemental level, dual enrollment—sometimes known as dual credit or concurrent enrollment—enrolls high school students in college-level courses. The exact nature of each dual enrollment program varies from state to state, but generally students earn college credits when they pass their classes. In many places, college tuition and fees are reduced As the U.S. emerged from last decade’s Great Recession, stories of home foreclosures, bankruptcies and unemployment levels were replaced with accounts of staggering student debt, low college graduation rates, prolonged delays to degrees, rising tuition costs, and program cutbacks and closures. These difficulties prompted parents, students, colleges and universities, politicians, and interest groups to call for higher education reforms. While these voices rarely agreed on a prescribed course of action, many of them worked from a perception of colleges and universities as failures with the current model of higher education as broken and requiring immediate action. Faculty and staff must respond to these demands because although it is not always explicitly stated, at its core, this public discourse
Peter Rachleff considers the meaning of the essays in respect to the continuing growth of employer organizing, including recent employer campaigns to further weaken—even eliminate altogether—organized labor. Despite much effort by pundits who suggest that the “new economy” and globalization decenters employer activism in the United States, one has only to look to the national, state, and local activism inhering in the American Legislative Exchange Commission to recognize how much employer activism remains central. The question to be answered is whether forces from below will develop a counterstrategy that might contest the power of employer activism in the way that workers did in earlier periods.
SUMMER 2016 25 ing and defending the liberal arts, and promoting gender and ethnic equity in colleges and universities across the U.S. Today, its mission remains “to make liberal education and inclusive excellence the foundation for institutional purpose and educational practice in higher education,” and it includes some 1,300 research universities, private liberal arts colleges, community The Competency-Based Approach to Higher Education: Are the AAC&U and Other Organizations Destroying Liberal Traditions?
WINTER 2015 87 Paul Hernandez, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized speaker and leader in college access and success, community outreach, and pedagogy for working with underserved and underprepared students. He was awarded the National Education Association’s Reg Weaver Human and Civil Rights Award, and is the author of The Pedagogy of Real Talk: Engaging, Teaching, and Connecting with Students at Risk.
