BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER AND BILL V. MULLEN As US colleges and universities were preparing to reopen their doors in August, we wrote in our fall 2020 Academe article, “The Necroliberal University,” that the reopening reflected a “necroliberal” consensus among university administrators that the benefits of a return to normalcy—and fiscal solvency—outweighed the risks of the…
BY JEFFREY SOMMERS A half century back, as noted in the fall 2020 Academe article I coauthored, “A Marshall Plan for Rebuilding Higher Education,” the United States began its retreat from public investments that had originally made it the world’s premier power. No longer wishing, or even thinking it possible, to retain its position of…
BY CHERYL NEALE-MCFALL Through our research and personal experiences, we know that the struggle is real for mothers in academia, especially during this pandemic. My experience is consistent with the challenges described in “COVID-19, Academic Mothers, and Opportunities for the Academy,” an article I coauthored with Mary A. Hermann for the fall issue of Academe.…
BY CHRIS ARNEY In 2020, The United States Military Academy at West Point terminated the employment of an assistant professor whose specialty is American women’s writing. In addition to her teaching, this professor helped lead the academy’s program to support talented cadets applying for graduate scholarships such as the Rhodes, Truman, and Marshall scholarships. Under…
BY CATHRYN BAILEY I once had a faculty colleague who could be as blunt as a barbell, as direct as a laser beam, and as unblinking as an ancient tortoise. A middle-aged woman of color, she eschewed the feminine niceties required to earn her likability badge in the raced and gendered game of social and…
BY THE NYU-AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 10/23/2020 Today, Zoom unilaterally shut down a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes. The webinar was scheduled to discuss the censorship, by Zoom and other big tech platforms, of an open classroom session last month at SFSU, featuring the…
BY GRAHAM A. PECK Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020. A video of the address is available here. In 2017, I…
BY DREW MCKEVITT Last week historian Lora Burnett at Collin College in Texas was the latest target of online harassment fomented by the website Campus Reform, only to be thrown under the bus by her administration in violation of its own academic freedom policies. Guest blogger Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech…
BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was…
BY KIMBERLY HARDING Spring 2020 was the unanticipated semester. Few thought in January 2020 that we would be teaching remotely by the end of March. Even then, hope existed that Fall 2020 would emerge as a more “normal” semester. This hope has since been put to rest for most institutions of higher learning. During this…