BY GAIL STYGALL Guest blogger Gail Stygall is a Professor of English at the University of Washington-Seattle. This is crossposted on Daily Kos. What is a university? What is a college? Fundamentally, a university is its faculty and students. At its heart, a university’s fundamental task is for its faculty to provide an education, as they…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Day 3 of the LIU lockout. Labor Day. I have been locked out of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus by an administration that makes my colleagues and me feel like poster children for the neoliberal corporatization of higher education. We have lost our health care and other benefits, our pay, and our…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Guest blogger Deborah Mutnick is a long-time professor at Long Island University’s Brooklyn, NY campus. As of 12:00 a.m., Saturday, September 3, my colleagues and I were locked out of our University in the midst of contract negotiations between our faculty union and management. The letter I got from the administration told…
BY GEFEN BAR-ON SANTOR Guest blogger Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa. I often feel in competition with the Internet as I search for materials to make my lectures more stimulating—a word many students use to describe what they want. No matter how engaging I try to become, there is still…
BY MICHAEL A. OLIVAS This is a guest post by Michael A. Olivas, the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law Center. The most recent of his fifteen books is Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He hosts a weekly NPR radio show,…
BY JOHANN N. NEEM Guest blogger Johann N. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. At the Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders argued that the Democrats came together to support debt-free higher education for all students…
BY JEFF BAKER The word overload can have more than one meaning to higher education faculty. It can mean increasing class size or adding additional course sections to the faculty member’s required minimum teaching load. While many full-time faculty welcome overloads as an opportunity to increase income, they are usually a bad deal. Adjunct…
Guest blogger Jerry Harp teaches at Lewis & Clark college. Judging from recent reports, one might think that trigger warnings—alerts about classroom material involving pedophilia, rape, and other disturbing topics—are the latest threat to civilization. To their credit, the warnings about trigger warnings are not entirely without merit, in that we do indeed need to…
This guest post is by J. Michael Rifenburg of the University of North Georgia: The NCAA was founded out of a need to provide more safety for students playing extracurricular sports, particularly football. A century later, safety issues may end the NCAA’s long run of lucrative dominance and governance of all thing intercollegiate athletics. According…
BY JEFFREY R. WILSON This is a guest post by Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University, where he teaches the “Why Shakespeare?” section of the university’s freshman writing course. My essay in the May/June 2016 online version of Academe, “What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College,” is meant to…