BY 36 COMMUNITY COLLEGE SUPPORTERS In December 2017, as the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities (CSCU) system office was preparing its “Students First” consolidation plan, the system’s Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) presented an extended critique of the proposal. It was not supportive, recommended other paths, and contained the following warning: “We believe that there is…
BY JOEL BERKOWITZ We thought the process would be straightforward. As it turns out, things got twisted. More than once. It all started with a simple invitation. As president of my campus’s chapter of the AAUP, I invited Joerg Tiede, senior program officer and researcher for the national organization, to come to campus to give a presentation of…
BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…
BY JAMES FERRY Academe editor Michael Ferguson reached out to me. He recalled that one of my gigs was teaching at a local prison, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing an article about my experiences. I leaped at the chance since graduate students don’t often get pitched on publishing opportunities.…
BY JENNIFER BRIER AND JORDAN “JT” TURNER Despite decades of activism and change, LGBTQ college students continue to face challenges that affect their experiences with higher education. Some are similar to what straight and cis students confront on a daily basis—economic struggles that make paying for school a significant hardship or mental health issues that…
BY LAURA W. PERNA According to a January 2020 Gallup poll, only 27 percent of adults in the United States believe that college is affordable. Democratic presidential candidates have responded to these concerns with proposals for free tuition at community colleges, student loan debt-forgiveness, and more. Some proposals, like increasing the amount of money that…
BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions…
BY OLGA GARCÍA ECHEVERRÍA This creative essay was inspired by Jane Harty’s Academe Blog post “Stress and PTSD in the Academy” and modeled after Judy Brady’s 1971 satirical feminist essay “I Want a Wife.” I belong to a category of workers known as adjuncts. I am an adjunct. According to the Oxford online dictionary, an…
BY STEVE MUMME AND CAPRICE LAWLESS This op-ed appeared originally in the Boulder Daily Camera [openforum@dailycamera.com]. It’s indicative of the dire state in which Colorado’s Community College System adjunct instructors now labor that the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado branch launched a Christmas season GoFundMe campaign to help tide them through the annual…
BY DANE KENNEDY The George Washington University faculty and staff ain’t got no culture. Or worse, we’ve got a negative culture. This was the verdict of the Disney Institute, which the president of our university commissioned last year to assess the culture on our campus. Fortunately, the institute, which is the “professional development and external…