BY KAITLIN POMERANTZ The following is reposted with permission from Hyperallergic, “a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society.” Kaitlin Pomerantz is an artist and educator in Philadelphia. In the short story “Swim Team,” by Miranda July, the protagonist teaches a group of people in a land-locked town to swim without…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The coronavirus pandemic has hit. The nation and the economy are in a free fall. Your college has closed and your college administration is announcing how there is nothing to see over here because the faculty—those miraculous, mythical, shapeshifting creatures—have morphed overnight from classroom teachers to “online educators” engaged in “online learning”…
BY AARON BARLOW Listen to our students. That’s the best way for us teachers to craft a successful end to a disrupted semester in a nation in crisis. After Kent State in 1970, we students at Utica College (like our contemporaries all over the country) shut our campus down. Under the leadership of faculty, however,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I last night were looking for entertainment and stumbled upon a 1921 silent film classic, The Blot, on Turner Classic Movies. Almost totally by chance we watched a few moments of TCM’s intro and soon were hooked. The Blot was directed by…
BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…
BY AARON BARLOW When I told my students on Wednesday that we would indeed be moving all of our activities online for the rest of the semester, they groaned. I was a little surprised. I thought they would like the idea that they could finish their classes from home. I believed that they would imagine…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, TIM GIBSON, AND BETSY DEMULDER This is the first in a series of three George Mason-AAUP Academe Blog posts on lessons learned from the presidential search campaign. Presidential searches conducted at public universities have become secretive processes that exclude most if not all forms of public vetting and engagement. Historically, finalists for…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS A big part of our success in chapter-building and awareness-raising in the Colorado Community College System is a list of facts we publish biennially in a document we call “The Adjunct Index,” modeled on the “Harper’s Index.” The index is an easy format to send to our press contacts, lawmakers, and to…
BY AARON BARLOW When I was in Peace Corps in West Africa, I could always tell where the butcher’s stand was by the vultures circling overhead. Today, I am seeing similar carrion feeders, ones hoping to snatch up the offal from the COVID-19 situation… The COVID-19 college closures are being seized upon by the EdTech…