BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE In recent years, right-wing lawmakers have mounted attacks on tenure in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Kentucky. These efforts have been based on the claim that tenure unduly protects liberal professors who squelch the voices of conservative students. Tenure has also been cited as an obstacle to getting rid of underperforming faculty in…
BY JASON STANLEY Yale University is a central democratic institution, a fact recognized by its tax-exempt status. It provides a forum in which society’s most difficult issues can be confronted and freely discussed. The University educator is thus tasked with presenting their students with intellectually rigorous foundational challenges to tradition; that is the role of…
BY JOHN HIGGINS A central aim of the newly published monograph Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance: Within the academic profession at Makerere University is to seek to get hold of an animating contradiction at work in global higher education policy by looking at the impact of global higher education policies on the academic profession as it…
BY ERIC SMAW Recently, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 233, which requires the state Board of Education and Board of Governors to conduct an annual survey of students and professors at public colleges and universities to determine if they feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints in the classroom. State Rep. Spencer Roach, who sponsored…
BY STEVE O’KANE Politics and morality are strange bedfellows. The famous sentence from Anna Karenina comes to mind: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sometimes the night passes in restful harmony, the temperature is just right, the pillows are soft, the lights are out, and not a…
BY ALEX ZUKAS In a recent Academe Blog post, Eva Cherniavsky wrote, “As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the…
BY THE COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATIONS (CUCFA) Hundreds of UC Senate Faculty stand in solidarity with our lecturer colleagues, represented by their union, UC-AFT, in their fight for better working conditions, including recognition as professionals with the right to be rehired. We owe it to them, to ourselves, to our students, and…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Great debates about critical race theory “rage” at all levels—including school boards, state legislatures, and national politics—we are told. As I have argued in the Columbus Dispatch, Inside Higher Ed, and Washington Monthly, and as others have pointed out, there is in fact no real debate, because there are no real…
BY JOSHUA M. MYERS For a moment in 2021, the national media seemed to care about the Afghan people. But the recent discourse surrounding the US withdrawal from a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan has revealed once again that the American corporate media is anything but an honest critic of the idea of American empire. We…
BY AMIT BAISHYA AND JULIE ANN WARD “OU Days of Action” was organized on September 20 and 21 to coincide with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents Meeting. This action was the culmination of a months-long process of appealing to OU’s upper administration to adopt basic, common-sense policies of COVID-19 mitigation, with little to…