BY MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE In the days since Academe published my essay, “The Monument and the Wrecking Crew: Ageism in the Academy,” which explored the misery of individuals and the high costs to society at large of losing tenure, additional faculty members have written to tell me their formerly hidden stories. The ways of getting rid…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Joe Knott, a member of the Board of Governors of the UNC system, wrote in a News & Observer op-ed on May 25th that UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty suffers from lack of “viewpoint diversity,” by which he means too few conservative professors for his liking. How does he propose to fix this alleged…
BY MARJORIE HEINS Guest blogger Marjorie Heins is the author of six books about civil liberties and civil rights, including Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, and, most recently, Ironies and Complications of Free Speech. Some issues in the American free-speech universe never die. Does teaching “creation science”…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT Guest blogger Robert A. Scott is President Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus, Adelphi University, and Author, How University Boards Work, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. I was recently part of a team engaged to review a regional teaching university with a new president who wants his institution to become a research university…
BY MISSY WATSON I’m a teacher and user of standardized English who strives to deconstruct and contest standardized English. My classes regularly feature essays, textbooks, and research studies that reveal the oppressive and discriminatory results of assuming, consciously or not, that standardized English is superior to all other language varieties. Last year, I happened to…
BY JOHN W. LAWRENCE In an article published in the May/June 2018 issue of Academe entitled Student Evaluations of Teaching Are Not Valid, I briefly reviewed the literature on whether student evaluations of teaching (SET) are good measures of teaching effectiveness. They are not. First, SET scores reflect race, gender, age and other biases of…
BY BEN TRACHTENBERG The Godfather famously advised, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Regardless of whether university trustees view faculty as friends, enemies, or something else altogether, they would be wise to pursue greater closeness with the people doing the teaching and research at their favorite campus. In particular, more universities should include…
BY SANDIE GRAVETT AND STELLA ANDERSON Last week, we formally launched our study Faculty Employment Rights and Hearing Procedures in Public Non-Union Universities by emailing a survey link to faculty members on the higher education campuses in the constituent institutions of the University of North Carolina. These 16 higher education campuses provide an excellent test…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The case of Jay Smith, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill history professor whose course on college athletics was quashed by university administrators, has received considerable attention because it raises serious questions about academic freedom. Yet, as recent events attest, the case is also important on shared governance grounds. Specifically, it…
BY WENDY BROWN The following is the text of an address delivered at commencement ceremonies for the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, on May 14. Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her remarks were originally posted at the Remaking the University blog. …