AAUP members should receive their print copies of the May/June issue of Academe over the next few days. In the meantime, they can read it online–as can anyone else (there’s no paywall around here). If you only know us through the blog, you may find the magazine worth your while. More in depth and carefully prepared, it is an important part of faculty conversation–and has been for a century, now.
I’ve tagged the issue “The Professional Nitty Gritty,” attempting to focus on some of the less grand, but nonetheless important, issues faced by American faculties. My editorial explains why:
Whether we are tenured senior faculty members, probationary for tenure, or teaching on contingent lines, we have spent years preparing for the work we are doing, and we continue to develop our courses, our institutions, and our own knowledge. Rare is that academic who does no more than recycle past syllabi, who teaches on autopilot, who sleeps through department meetings, and whose reputation rests on scholarship of the distant past.
It’s the little things that make up our everyday lives, and it is these that lead, of course, to many of our “higher” discussions. Understanding them, therefore, is always important.
In the first two articles, Julie Vargas and Jonathan Rees look at questions surrounding our increasing responsibilities teaching online. After that, Joseph A. Raelin and June Kevorkian describe a consortium project among Massachusetts universities. Journalism professor Michael McDevitt follows with a description of how easily a program can be killed. The relation between Gender Studies and the “value” of education, which has been in the news recently, is then explored by Carol Colatrella in relation to STEM programs. In a related article, Liz Fayer, Garreth Zalud, Mark Baron, and Cynthia M. Anderson revisit questions of women in science. Next, Alisa Roost and Noah Roost provide an introduction to dealing with veterans in the classroom. Then J. Elizabeth Miller and Peter Seldin describe evolving classroom evaluations. Finally, Clara Wajngurt discusses bullying within the faculty and Barb Holdcroft looks at it when students do it.
There are also three book reviews in the issue, of Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities by Robert Samuels; Education, and Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Henry A. Giroux, Sophia A. McClennen, and Kenneth J. Saltman; and Higher Education in America by Derek Bok.
AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum‘s column and the short Nota Bene items round out the issue.
Of course, you are welcome to comment on the articles or discuss them here. Posts related to many of them will appear over the next week or so.
