The Proposed Evisceration of Tenure at Saint Louis University

This, from the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday: “Post-tenure review should be for the purposes of assisting faculty members in improving their performance,” says B. Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the AAUP. “But the policy that has been proposed would effectively eviscerate tenure as it’s understood at most institutions of higher learning.” Unfortunately, that seems to be…

The Continuing “Silent Crisis”

From the Department of Old News: When I returned to teaching eleven years ago, it was as an adjunct. That was fine with me. In fact, it was exactly what I wanted. My store and cafe had suffered collateral damage from the dot-com bust and I needed to cut expenses. One of those was health…

Business Experience As Academic Qualification? Oh, Really?

The following is a guest post by Michael DeCesare, associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology & Criminology, and president of the AAUP Chapter, at Merrimack College. The president of the University of Toledo plans to appoint his former chief financial officer (CFO) to the position of provost and executive vice president for…

Wal-Mart for Walden Pond

When Dave Tomar’s new book The Shadow Scholar: How I made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat appears next month, the attention is probably going to be on the failings of the students and on the ethical faults of those abetting them. Perhaps it should also be on the rest of us, who have allowed a diploma…

Delphi Report on Contingent Faculty: A Professor’s Response

The following is a guest post by Donald Rogers. Rogers is the chair of the Organization of American Historians Committee on Part-Time, Adjunct and Contingent Faculty, and serves as the OAH liaison to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. He is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University. Recently, the…

Comparing Talking MOOCs

This post is a re-presentation/slightly edited version of this post from my own blog where I have lately been discussing my participation in a Coursera MOOC “World Music.” Throw a brick out a window nowadays and you are liable to hit an article about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); conveniently, The Chronicle of Higher Education has…

How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps

This piece, by Debra Leigh Scott, originally appeared on the blog The Homeless Adjunct. It is reposted here with her permission: A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and…

Once More: The Value of History and Context

Last week, Mitt Romney directed that Obama “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” For good and bad, ‘division and anger’ have always been part of American politics. Take the case of Alexander Hamilton. He was called “Tom S**t” in one New York paper, was accused of having African ancestry…

Commodifying “Content”

Four recent incidents have made me aware again of one of those itches it seems impossible to scratch, the valuation of “content” as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Scholarship, today, becomes simply the thing for sale. The first of these was the resignation of Jonah Lehrer from The New Yorker. The second…