Staying on top of faculty issues at UW–Madison

One of the reasons, maybe the main reason, that PROFS decided to put this Faculty Forum at the literal and figurative center of its new website was simple: We sense that there’s a need for better lines of communication about what’s happening on campus and beyond: Even if you read the local papers (including resources like the Campus Connection blog), the student papers, and keep up with UW’s own News, it’s easy to feel like you’re missing a lot. While faculty concerns represent something of a gap in the vast  network of information, we’d like to call attention to a few sources we keep an eye on for news.

First, for general information about what’s happening on campus, Sifting and Winnowing has become a valuable voice in recent months. It bills itself as “An independent news and opinion page for the UW-Madison community”.  S&W is covering a lot of topics now, but it first got on the radar of many people on campus during the Grad School restructuring discussions. Between the posts, guest posts and comments, S&W helped a lot of us keep abreast of a rapidly changing situation.

Second, a number of blogs on campus are written by people who research higher education issues. One, Education Optimists is written by Sara Goldrick-Rab (Educational Policy Studies) together with Liam Goldrick. It has just been named one of the best education blogs in the country by the Washington Post. Also, Kris Olds (Geography) has a good blog on global higher education.

Finally, later this semester Noel Radomski of WISCAPE tells us that they plan to go live with a blog, focusing on post-secondary education articles, reports, studies that are relevant for our campus, system, and state. We look forward to that and will let you know as we find out more.

If you know of other resources, please let me or another member of the PROFS team know.