hammer with dark wooden handle and steel head lying on lighter wood surface

The Hammer by Hamilton Nolan

BY JONATHAN REES I spent a couple of days over spring break in New Orleans checking out museums. As is my tendency, I also walked a few blocks away from the French Quarter to visit an independent book store. Baldwin & Co. is great, but that’s a post for another blog. What I want to…

a stack of eleven red books, with AAUP policy documents and reports, on a wooden desk, starting with most recent edition in hardcover on the bottom, older paperback versions in the middle, and the first spiral-bound version on the top

Revised Redbook Statement on Online Education

BY JONATHAN REES I read the AAUP’s Redbook from back to front. What I mean by that is that when a problem comes up, I ask myself, “I wonder what the AAUP has to say about this?” then search the index of the Redbook in order to see the collective wisdom of 110-odd years of…

Gradebook show a table listing letter grades, including an A-, a B, and an A.

Your Gradebook Is Not Your Friend

BY JONATHAN REES I am old enough to have used a physical gradebook when I started teaching. It looked like it was filled with graph paper, but there was definitely an extra-large space on the left for the students’ names and room to do some calculating all the way on the other side. I abandoned…

black umbrella open with rain pouring down above and around it and green foliage visible in the background

Presidential Selection Is Not Like the Weather

BY JONATHAN REES The key part of what the AAUP Redbook has to say about the role of faculty in the selection of a new university president is in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities: “Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The…

white letter blocks spelling out TRUMP in all caps cast a dark shadow on a white surface below

Trump University, Part II

BY JONATHAN REES Did you know that Donald Trump has promised to create a free national online university if he gets to become president again? You can read the basics of his proposal in Politico: Donald Trump wants to “revolutionize” higher education if elected president. And in a new campaign policy video, he is pledging…

On a brick plaza, a white seagull is holding a piece of bread, and a brown seagull is trying to take it

Faculty Compensation—Like Seagulls Fighting for Scraps?

BY JONATHAN REES We’ve been arguing over salaries at my university. Sometimes we get cost-of-living adjustments, but those almost never keep up with inflation (even during years when inflation is low). There’s a model developed by our Faculty Compensation Committee designed to allocate additional funds on the basis of equity, but what is equity, anyway?…

screen with background resembling a chalkboard shows a graduation cap, the words "Online Education," and a cursor in the shape of a hand pointing to the words

It’s Time for a New AAUP Statement on Online Education

BY JONATHAN REES I’m a member of the AAUP Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication. Last week, committee chair Hank Reichman and I convened a listening session at the AAUP biennial meeting to start the long process of revising the organization’s statement regarding online education. The existing Statement on Online and Distance Education dates from…

Academic Freedom and the Learning Management System

BY JONATHAN REES Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo and a member of the AAUP Council. The following is reposted from his “More or Less Bunk” blog. This morning [August 1], I delivered this paper in the Academic Freedom session at the West Coast Division of the American Historical…

Their Textbook, Your Choice.

BY JONATHAN REES Way back when I was new to teaching I got into an argument with my then-department chairman about the textbook to assign in my American history survey course. I had my choice. He had a choice that he thought we should all assign because it was “the leading textbook in the field.”…

The Invasion Has Already Begun

BY JONATHAN REES AND JONATHAN PORITZ A lot of people we know were beating up on an essay by Jeff Selingo in the Washington Post a few weeks ago. [See, for instance, Hank Reichman’s analysis here.] We certainly agree that putting tenure on some kind of clock won’t do anything to save universities money in…

ACADEME BLOG

The blog of Academe magazine

Author Archives: Jonathan Rees