UPDATE: I’ll be speaking at a panel on “Shared Governance and Academic Freedom: Where Are We Now?” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Weds. Feb. 11, 7:30pm @ University YMCA, 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association. On a related topic, the AAUP chapter at UIUC has issued these two statements on…
Why are the Far Right criticisms of Progressives almost always retreads? (Much like their “new” proposals for promoting broadly shared prosperity and political inclusion, which have never seem to have been implemented quite purely or thoroughly enough to produce results even remotely close to those that have been promised—or so the repeated rationalization of their…
Two decades ago, I wrote a book titled “The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.” Two decades later, the myth continues. Today, the proponent is Jonathan Chait, who warns us in New York Magazine of this dire evil resurrected from the distant past: Political correctness. According to Chait, “Political correctness is…
On January 29, this was the lead headline on the NBC Nightly News newsfeed: “Malaysia Airlines MH370 Declared an ‘Accident,’ Search for Survivors Ends.” On the surface, this headline is absurd in at least two very obvious ways. First, how can the loss of the plane be declared an “accident” when no one has located…
On Friday, the Executive Committee of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) posted on the Association’s website a “clarification” of its position on the controversial rejection by the Association’s board of a sizeable donation from the KAT Foundation to fund dissertation fellowships and to be named for Professor Stephen Cohen and…
This is a guest post from Karen Davis, a lecturer in cinematic arts at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a statewide academic senator. On January 23, the Academic Senate of the California State University unanimously passed AS-3199/FA: Non Tenure Track Faculty and Shared Governance in the California State University: A Call to Campus Senates.…
If the residential learning experience continues to define a wide range of traditional higher education settings, then college leadership – including faculty – must become far more intentional about it. At the moment, there are two principal levels of influence dominating the residential part of the learning experience. The first is the presumed social contract…
Recently, news about a set of demands by activist students at Clemson University concerned about racism and intolerance spread like wildfire across the internet when a group of 110 faculty and staff published a letter in the student newspaper endorsing those demands. These students and faculty were accused by various conservative websites of wanting to…
After my mother died, in cleaning out her house I went through my father’s old books, pulling out the ones that I might find of use in my own writing and teaching. Among those was a dusty paperback of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I returned to it recently, remembering it from…