BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. The biggest mainstream media higher ed story last week–and this–has been the lawsuit charging Harvard with discrimination against Asian American applicants. My piece on it has been delayed by…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE FACULTY POLICIES COMMITTEE At a time when tenure is under attack in the American academy, it is heartening to be able to offer some good news. By a message sent on October 10, 2018, Devorah Lieberman, President of the University of La Verne, announced that, “The Board of Trustees,…
BY MARK HULSETHER In my last post, I argued that “refereed” does not equal good, nor “non-refereed” bad—but rather “refereed or not” and “quality scholarship or not” (alongside other factors) are independent variables with approximately random correlation, at least in the intellectual networks where I do my work. I did not expect to see slam…
BY DANIEL WEIMER, DARIN MCGINNIS, DANIEL O’HARE, AND JEFF RUTHERFORD Wheeling Jesuit University is a small, mission-driven university that, due to years of administrative turnover, has consistently been faced with financial challenges. In early 2017, our Board of Trustees hired Dr. Debra Townsley to engineer a “turnaround” at WJU to alleviate our serious long-term debt.…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This piece is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Many people are worried about the damage the Kavanaugh appointment will do to the Supreme Court and to American politics. I’m worried about the new damage…
BY FRANK VON HIPPEL Like many Americans, I felt distressed about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science and scientists following the 2016 election, especially as those attacks related to critical environmental issues such as climate change and pollution. I participated in the March for Science, but at the same time pondered what I could do…
BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald…
BY HARRY HELLENBRAND [Ed. note: Harry Hellenbrand was provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). A little more than a year ago the Chancellor of the California State University system (CSU) issued two executive orders governing general education and remediation. The directives, prepared and released without appropriate faculty input, were immediately controversial,…
BY LEAH P. HOLLIS My Journal of Academic Freedom article “The Ironic Interplay of Free Speech and Silencing discusses academic freedom in the context of workplace bullying. In it, I consider the need to balance free speech rights with an individual’s right to a psychologically safe workplace. During my campus visits and talks about workplace…
BY JAIME WEIDA I have a confession to make: along with being an English professor, I am a huge science fiction nerd. While I spend my time online reading articles and news from the websites for the MLA, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Federation of Teachers, and—of course—the AAUP, I also spend an…