John Wilson’s post on comedians who have been critical of college audiences is a terrific essay–one of the most incisively perceptive pieces on any topic that I have read this year. I would humbly add just a couple of observations of my own to the discussion that John’s essay should provoke. Provocative figures, including provocative…
Andrew Delbanco, writing in The New York Review of Books, looks over the state of American universities, noting the promise they once represented but writing that: Today this story is stalled. At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our…
In a guest editorial for the Concord Monitor, demographer Peter Franchese argues persuasively that the future of New Hampshire’s economy requires a much larger state investment in public higher education, in particular in its community colleges. After framing the issues with reference to his own family history, Franchese focuses on the following “paradoxes” and “projections”:…
Shortly after the AAUP’s annual membership meeting placed the administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on its list of censured administration for its summary dismissal of Professor Steven Salaita in response to his anti-Israeli comments on Twitter, I received an email from an old friend from the California State University Academic Senate,…
After Walmart and other retailers announced that they would stop stocking and selling items that feature the Confederate flag and related symbols, the news commentators on the cable news networks (or at least on CNN and MSNBC) began to refer to those items repeatedly and rather uniformly as “racist kitsch.” “Kitsch” is, of course, pronounced…
It has been six months since Judge Curtis Karnow ruled in favor of San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s challenge to the decision by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to revoke the accreditation of City College of San Francisco, about which I have been reporting on this blog. (Links to all…
1) Academic freedom is not to be compromised in collective bargaining agreements and faculty handbooks that perfunctorily affirm an institutional commitment to defend academic freedom, yet declare the faculty has a responsibility to be civil, accurate and professional in all matters. Conditionality in academic freedom statements is a ruse to sanction those who deviate from the…
It is often claimed that supporters of academic freedom and tenure, like the AAUP, are simply left-wing or liberal professors seeking to protect their own positions and privilege their own views. Those of us who know better realize how ridiculous this argument can be, but now, in the wake of Scott Walker’s attack on tenure…
Prepared by the Leadership of the Ohio Conference of AAUP: _________________________ Previous Posts in This Series: 2015 Ohio Higher Education Report, Part 1: https://academeblog.org/2015/06/20/2015-ohio-higher-education-report-part-1/ 2015 Ohio Higher Education Report, Part 2: https://academeblog.org/2015/06/20/2015-ohio-higher-education-report-part-2/ 2015 Ohio Higher Education Report, Part 3: https://academeblog.org/2015/06/21/2015-ohio-higher-education-report-part-3/ 2015 Ohio Higher Education Report, Part 4: https://academeblog.org/2015/06/21/2015-ohio-higher-education-report-part-4/