Plus ça change…

Three years before publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1835, Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony (then not yet twenty), saw her Domestic Manners of the Americans reach print. It’s a delightful book, though not particularly kind to the people of the young republic. Nonetheless, Mrs. Trollope had quite the eye, and wit to match.

Trading Academic Freedom for Foreign Markets

By Marjorie Heins, founder, Free Expression Policy Project The current controversy over Yale University’s planned campus in Singapore is, at bottom, an argument over how much compromise on free speech is justified in exchange for the presumed benefits of locating branches of U.S. universities within authoritarian regimes. Although the champions of global ventures like Yale’s…

Accuracy in Academia?

One of the interesting things about fishing in unknown waters is that you never quite know what will come up when you reel in the line. It has only been a few weeks since my first post here, but I am already getting intriguing responses. One on Tuesday follows my post with the tongue-in-cheek title Reminder…

The Lyceum Movement Online

The things we get most exciting about, the things we find most enticing and revolutionary, are also things most likely to be old–once you strip away the new skin. They are the familiar wrapped up in shiny new presentations. The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) are a case in point. When you look at them…

Reminder to Self: Get Out More

In the December 23, 1869 edition of The Nation, Francis Parkman wrote: The New England man of letters… was apt to be a recluse, ignorant of the world, bleached by a close room and an iron stove, never breathing the outer air when he could help it, and resembling a medieval monk in his scorn…

The Myths about Tenure

Ron Lipsman, a former senior associate dean at the University of Maryland, writes at Minding the Campus attacking tenure: “In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague.” This is nonsense. Plenty of tenured professors do get fired every year…

The Physical College

In a New York Times opinion piece that appeared last month, Jeff Selingo of The Chronicle of Higher Education lays out ‘urgent needs’ for American colleges and universities. There are many; we are not in a position where coasting along on old assumptions will suffice. But Selingo completely ignores one area where change must come, the physical layouts of our…

An Article I Really Haven’t Time For

A couple of months ago, someone sent me a link to an article from The Washington Post by David Levy called “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?” It still rankles. Levy writes: Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15…

The Responsibility Behind Academic Freedom

This is a version of a piece I posted six years ago on my own blog, One Flew East. I am offering it again now as a way of introducing myself to the Academe blog: How can we in academia make the case for “academic freedom” to the broader public and move our own understanding…