Workers' Control in Academia.

I was a labor historian earlier in my career. Sadly, I hardly ever get to teach that subject anymore because the class never fills. However, the lessons that most of the best labor historians I read during graduate school described in their work have never left me. Indeed, they seem more relevant to my own…

The Faculty as Punching Bag.

I’ve been working on a book about the effect of the Internet on the terms of employment and working conditions of faculty at all levels.  As a result, I’ve read an extraordinary amount of “disruption” literature lately.  You know, Christensen, Carey, et. al.  – all those people who are just chomping at the bit to…

Michael Crow is not the Devil.

  I was at the AAUP Annual Meeting and conference in Washington, D.C. last week. If you’ve never been you should definitely go as it is both fun and informative. Among other things, I met many of the people responsible for this very blog for the first time. But that’s not what I want to…

Pivoting is hard to do.

Usually, I save everything I write about subjects like tenure for the blog that you’re reading now.  After all, I’m in the AAUP and even if you’re not (and you certainly should be), you’re probably sympathetic to most of the principles that the AAUP stands for otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog in the…

The academic equivalent of a corporate campaign.

Does your university have troubles? At the risk of turning this post into the academic equivalent of Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, your school probably has nothing on Northern New Mexico College. The situation there has come up before on this blog, and to summarize let’s just say their administration hasn’t exactly covered itself in…

Crazy?

Getting to “know” other academics on Twitter is a very strange process. First you follow the ones you know. Then you follow the most interesting people who they “know,” and by then other folks who they follow who you don’t know have started following you. One of the people I’ve gotten to “know” through this…

My class, my choice.

“To be absolutely blunt, it is time for individual faculty to give up, cheerfully and not grudgingly, any claim to sole authority over teaching methods of any kind.” – Former Princeton President William Bowen earlier this week at the “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow” conference at Rice University (via Jason Jones). That’s a pretty…

You are not alone.

Last Friday, the Colorado Conference of the AAUP (for which I serve as co-President) held a one-day meeting at Fort Lewis College in Durango devoted to the topic of shared governance. Our thinking behind planning this gathering was that Colorado higher education seemed to be going crazy. So many weird things had been happening at…