Dr Paul L. DeVito died suddenly and unexpectedly over the weekend of August 22-23, 2015. He had been provost at Saint Xavier University for two years. During his tenure, many witnessed a recrudescence of morale on campus, and an extraordinary commitment to academic freedom, shared governance and faculty activism. He was the greatest administrator I…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
The proposed intolerance policy at the University of California is a badly written, repressive, and fundamentally misguided policy that any true university should be embarrassed to even consider adopting. Universities are free to express collective values so long as they do not seek to punish those who disagree. But they ought to be careful in…
The following is an expanded version of a letter to the editor published last week in the Louisiana State University Daily Reveille. The author is LSU Professor of Physics and Astronomy A.R.P. (Ravi) Rau, who serves currently as President of AAUP’s Louisiana Conference and is a former president of the LSU AAUP chapter. The text…
One year ago, on September 11, 2014, Stephen Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. This is not a date that has attracted any media attention on its anniversary, and seems to have gone completely unmentioned, perhaps because Salaita’s dismissal by this time was a foregone conclusion. But this is a…
Butler University Dean of Communications Gary Edgerton has fired the adviser of the student newspaper, Loni Smith McKown. Here’s how it happened: On August 19, McKown received an email sent to faculty by Edgerton about potential budget cuts due to lower projected enrollments. She forwarded the email to the editors of the Collegian, as she…
Billie Wright Dziech has an essay today at Inside Higher Ed arguing that there’s too much sexuality in our society, and so we need to restrict the freedom of professors and students in discussing sexuality in order to protect students from sexual assault. It’s a bizarre and disturbing argument that courses about sexuality are somehow…
“Quitpieces?” That’s what Ian Bogost calls them in The Atlantic, writing “No One Cares That You Quit Your Job.” He’s right, but I’m more interested in what they say about our profession and what we can learn from them than in anything about any individuals. Two such quitpieces were posted two days ago, one by…
The most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine includes a very thought-provoking article by Frederick deBoer, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in English at Purdue University. In “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.,” deBoer considers the whole gamut of ramifications of the increasing corporatization of our universities. After very succinctly but…
In the comments to one of the posts on this blog, someone wrote: in my opinion, faculty absolutely should not be governing a university. We need broadly trained academic professionals who understand the business of higher education making decisions, not narrowly-focused/educated faculty members who are likely privileged, entitled, and completely out of touch with the…