BY TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN A note from Academe Blog contributing editor Jennifer Ruth: This is the first part of a special two-part series by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn on the DeSantis plan for higher education. It is required reading for all of us working to thwart the state-driven fascism (or what I have been calling “subnational authoritarianism”)…
BY RICHARD P. PHELPS With each public remark a scholar may add to society’s collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholar’s portrayal of previous research on the topic. Editors…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY This month the Georgia conference of the AAUP released results of a statewide survey of faculty opinions on changes to tenure and the AAUP censure of the University System of Georgia. I’ll get to the results later. But I wanted to describe how and why we as an advocacy conference set out…
BY PEDRO GARCÍA-CARO The University of Oregon’s Office of the Provost will host an online conference devoted to “Academic Freedom and the Public University” on Friday, October 14, 2022. Building on the university’s public defense of academic freedom, we invite faculty and administrators from other colleges and universities to participate. This conference will focus on…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT In the annals of academic freedom, Chandler Davis (Chan, as he was known to family and friends), who died last month, was a towering figure. His principled refusal to comply (on First Amendment grounds) with a HUAC investigation of communism at the University of Michigan, led to his dismissal from the…
BY JANE S. GABIN Many have read the Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest survey of public university presidents’ salaries and are appropriately horrified: sixteen presidents make over $1 million a year. This underlines the overall problem with US higher education: too many people are making too much money. Higher education in the United States has…
BY ALEX SMALL Breathe easy, everyone. We physicists have a strategy to help all students pass tough introductory classes. Hear me out. An administrator recently said that more students would pass freshman physics if faculty gave more frequent and early feedback. Students could study more effectively if they had some way to gauge their understanding…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY Call me cynical, but any piece of legislation or policy prescription that receives bipartisan support these days gives me the willies. When Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, it usually involves bloated military budgets or, in the case of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, doubling down on roads and bridges in the…
BY TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN In a bold move, sixteen faculty, staff, students, and alumni recently filed a suit calling on Washington’s attorney general to remove from office six trustees, including the interim president, of Seattle Pacific University (SPU). Given the real risks involved, especially for those currently on SPU’s payroll, we should applaud these plaintiffs…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Growing up was always hard to do. It’s getting harder, and universities now are doing little to help the new “lost generation.” Experts on children, youth, and college students never tire of superficial generalizations about the ease or difficulty of growing up over time. They seldom define terms, specify ages, present…