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…
Last week the AAUP released a supplementary report about the dismissal of tenured professor Teresa Buchanan from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, which has been on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations since 2012. The report raises questions about the extent to which LSU followed its own policies and AAUP-approved principles of due process in…
By Stephen Kuusisto When Iowa’s Board of Regents selected J. Bruce Herreld, a businessman with no prior experience in education, as the new president of the University of Iowa they affirmed three principles: the university is now strictly a business, the faculty and students are to be put in their respective places, and those places…
As Executive Editor of this blog, I have a tweet automatically produced for each post. It goes out over my name. Most often, that results in retweets and mentions that are positive; sometimes, quite the opposite. Never before, however, had I seen anything like this: .@AaronJBarlow Indian government should ban you from entering because of…
By Stephen Kuusisto We are living in the age of autocracy, a matter that’s clear, as every conceivable matter of public concern is about who controls what. It is hard to derive solace from the assertion America was always an oligarchy, that our founders were aristocrats, wealthy, and privileged. The second President of the…
Guest blogger Lyn S. Graybill had earlier taught in West Africa as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Fourah Bay College of the University of Sierra Leone. When the plane landed in Abidjan in August, I was excited. I had been accepted under a three year contract to teach Political Science courses at the International University of Grand-Bassam,…