BY JONATHAN REES In the last week of classes of the spring 2025 semester, our administration announced a deal that would allow Barnes & Noble to take over our university bookstore. It included an arrangement that would guarantee students access to all their textbooks on the first day of classes, in exchange for students paying…
BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned the scientific community by proposing that researchers stop submitting articles to high-impact academic journals and instead publish in government-run outlets. The backlash was swift. Within a day, The Washington Post received more than four thousand comments—most of them scathing. But buried beneath the outrage lies a…
BY REBECCA DOLHINOW AND DAVID SCHULTZ Rebecca Dolhinow of California State University, Fullerton, and David Schultz of Hamline University seek chapter proposals for an edited book anthology tentatively entitled Trumpism and the Corporate University. Trumpism and the Corporate University will be an edited volume that examines the rise of the corporate university over the last…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY At the AAUP Conference and Biennial Meeting last month, one of the most widely discussed sessions featured the presentation of a recent white paper written by Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s new Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ I am a PhD candidate studying undergraduate teaching and learning at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, which serves a predominantly multiracial, multiethnic first-generation student population. Though students have been advised by higher-ups to keep our energies on our studies and our thoughts unsullied by internal university politics, I have juggled both…
BY NEIL KRAUS “The public has lost confidence in higher education.” This narrative is everywhere, its ubiquity reminiscent of the failing K–12 schools refrain post–A Nation at Risk. News stories about polling results, opinion pieces advocating increased online education, and consultants seeking to sell a wide range of products remind us of the public’s declining…
BY JOHN A. ETERNO Faculty at many universities are experiencing frustration. Universities should be bastions of creativity, scholarship, and democracy, but administrators have been using a corporate management style which invariably leaves the faculty behind. Most importantly, shared governance, once a staple of higher learning, is becoming a relic of the past. Faculty, to the…
By JOHN K. WILSON Christian Coons, an associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, has been suspended and faces a hearing on March 20 that could lead to his dismissal. His crime? Sending emails to his colleagues about his department’s alleged past misconduct in hiring decisions. A university is seriously considering the dismissal…
BY GLYNN WOLAR The push toward implementing a workforce development orientation at the community colleges has been ongoing for several years. In 2016, the Brookings Institute published an extensive report articulating what might be termed an uncritically positive posture toward this development. There is no doubt that community college administrators are generally enthused about implementing…
BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER Once upon a time, the administration of a sleepy state university proposed a new budget, offering the rationale that the new budget would “incentivize” departments and promote “entrepreneurial” conduct—couching it in terms of “decentralized” operations and rewarding colleges for increases in their student full-time equivalent enrollments. Three years into the proposed experiment…