A Faculty Evaluation Manifesto to Counteract Bias
BY SYDNEY FREEMAN, JR., AND DEBORAH THORNE Results from student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are biased; the evidence is irrefutable. Students more harshly assess female instructors and instructors of color. Despite that, in the professional lives of instructors, SETs are extremely consequential—they are used to guide very high stakes personnel decisions such as whether one…
Dictating Civics: How the Purdue Civics Literacy Requirement Was Imposed by Trustees and Administrators
BY DANIEL MORRIS On June 11, 2021, the Purdue Board of Trustees passed a civics literacy requirement for undergraduates despite opposition from the faculty senate. Placed in the context of what happened at the University of North Carolina in April, when, as Lindsie Rank reports, “the board of trustees refused to approve the faculty’s recommendation…
The Consequences of Official Departmental Anti-Zionism
BY CARY NELSON John Wilson has recently claimed that official anti-Zionist proclamations by academic departments are protected by academic freedom. “A statement is just a statement,” his Academe Blog post concludes, “It’s not an act of oppression.” Wilson was writing in opposition to my own June 3 essay in Inside Higher Education, “Is Academic Freedom…
The Hindu Right Chokes Academic Freedom
BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE In early March 2021, I awoke to a social media barrage of misogynist and bigoted slurs, unhinged accusations, and threats to hurt me and my family. For a few days, I thought little about this. Since 2015, I have suffered online harassment from those who dislike my scholarship, especially a branch of…
The Right-Wing “Renewal” of Higher Education in North Carolina
BY HASSAN MELEHY By now, the decision by the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees to refuse a tenured professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones is a well-known story. One trustee, speaking anonymously, made clear that the motive was “politics.” In North Carolina we’re familiar with the right-wing policymaking that governs us: one of its major sources is…
Why It’s Time for For-Profit Colleges to Fend for Themselves
BY SHARON BASKIND-WING For-profit colleges are not deserving of your tax dollars. By now, most of us have heard of the many controversies surrounding these for-profit institutions: that they don’t deliver on employment promises, have poorly qualified faculty, are overpriced, spend too much on a racist recruitment process, and create more debt than their graduates…
Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions
BY MILES D. MAYER I recently spoke with students and colleagues at Doane University regarding failing leadership in higher education. After many spirited discussions, the conclusion was that in higher education, as in the corporate world, some leaders are taking advantage of the times, making decisions that would otherwise call for discussion and approval of…
The International Academic Community Must Respond to Repression in India
BY JYOTSNA KAPUR AND NEEPA MAJUMDAR Words fail, as everyday India sinks to new depths of cruelty, injustice, and sheer apathy under the Modi administration. India counts today for almost one-third of the deaths from COVID-19, with people reduced to frantically chasing after a cylinder of oxygen, dying because they failed to get to a…
UNC Hussman Faculty Statement on Nikole Hannah-Jones
BY UNC HUSSMAN FACULTY As Hussman School of Journalism and Media faculty, we are stunned at the failure to award tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize, Peabody, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” winner and UNC-Chapel Hill 2019 Distinguished Alumna recently inducted into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame. This was reported…