I was associated with the University of Connecticut for almost 25 years before I learned that I did not have academic freedom. Naively I had assumed that all American institutions of higher learning, except some small religious colleges, guaranteed academic freedom. I had hoped that the current contract negotiations between UConn’s trustees and its chapter…
A little over ten years ago, two adequately eminent sociology departments swiped two of my colleagues. For years, I wondered why the then-dean didn’t try to stop those raids; I’ve finally decided that the answer lies in a tangle of college and interdepartmental politics and corporatization, as well as the fact that one of the swipes was a woman. (In the not so…
[excerpted from How Strategic Planning Encourages Academic Capitalism is forthcoming in Sheila Slaughter (Editor), Barrett Jay Taylor (Editor), Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development: Competitive Advantage in Europe, the US, and Canada, Springer For almost 40 years, institutions of higher education have been writing business plans – sometimes called strategic plans or, more pretentiously, academic plans. By anticipating…