In an exasperating article on the op-ed page of The New York Times today, science writer Benedict Carey argues for the benefit of testing, conflating all types from yearly standardized tests to weekly quizzes and ignoring the indisputable fact that tests are primarily regressive (they test what is known, sometimes at the expense of what might…
‘Academic freedom is in the eye of the beholder.’ That, I think, will be the most common takeaway by readers of Stanley Fish’s new book Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). After all, he breaks the concept into five “schools”: The “It’s just a job” school (his own…
Soon after I returned from Peace Corps service in 1990, I started to hear of a new organization called “Teach for America.” People fancied it as something of a domestic Peace Corps, which rankled. Not only did I remember the suspicion toward VISTA volunteers in Western North Carolina in the sixties, but I knew the reasons…
Joining the AAUP says that you want to help shape the future of our profession. You want a voice in matters such as academic freedom, faculty governance, career issues, tenure, economic security for contingent faculty, and the overuse of contingent appointments. By joining the AAUP, you help shape the future of our profession. In addition, there…
From October, 1985 to July, 1987, I taught at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in American Studies and Literature. It was an interesting–and sometimes frightening–time. Two years before I arrived, a leftist firebrand from the Upper Volta (the name of the country at the time) military named Thomas…
Who should teach? And who should decide who teaches? What should the learning environment look like? And who should decide how it looks–and should there even be just one “look”? These old questions came to mind today when I read Marty Nemko’s October 29 article in Time, “Why Ph.D.s Shouldn’t Teach College Students.” I went…
In the upcoming Nov/Dec issue of Academe (due out in the next few days), we’ve not one but two articles arguing against the business model in education. Treating colleges and corporations and students as customers makes no sense. We who teach know this. Unfortunately, the boards of trustees an upper administrators who set policy seem to have…
Last week, at a meeting of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Professional Staff Congress (the CUNY faculty union), the name Anita Sarkeesian came up. Though she is not an academic (in the sense of being employed by a college or university), she felt forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University due to threats…
In Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that the “elite” ought to get out more. He has no quarrel with the idea or efficacy of an elite, he simply believes that its members in contemporary America have too little experience of the rest of the world. One of his acolytes,…
The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll. At the same time,…