BY MARYBETH GASMAN All one has to do in order to understand the depth of anxiety felt by assistant professors on the tenure track is to spend an hour on Twitter following the hashtags #academictwitter or #academicchatter. Tenure-track faculty members are feeling uncertain, stressed, overworked, and frightened of the tenure process and its unforgiving inhumanity.…
BY NATE HOLDREN Faculty members are exhausted. That’s no surprise given that we are overworked in a distressing world. I’ve begun to suspect there’s an additional factor in our exhaustion, which I call “moral distress,” and which administrators are worsening without realizing it. Several commentators have talked about medical workers facing moral injury. That’s when…
BY KEVIN HOWLEY For G. K. Professors are anxious and burned out. They’ve been pivoting. They’ve been juggling work and child care. They’ve been worried—about Covid-19, the economy, social justice, the nation’s divisive political climate. —The Chronicle of Higher Education In all of my time as a campus administrator—granted it’s only been three weeks since…
BY ALEX ZUKAS Like many other university administrations across the United States, National University in San Diego, CA, is using the COVID-19 crisis as cover to enact draconian measures, some of which were mentioned on this blog in July 2020. Most recently, the university is requiring faculty to sign a liability waiver to access their…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Last summer, even as COVID-19 cases were surging, university leaders in North Carolina tried to engineer a return to normal by August 2020. It famously failed. Soon after the start of the semester yielded a burst of COVID-19 clusters, the state’s two flagship universities, UNC–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, shut…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The sobering social and economic costs of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. The challenge for teachers to keep working via Zoom are not so much physical now, as they are mental and emotional, especially for those of us used to teaching face-to-face in classrooms. Being in Zoom rooms too often…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ AND MICHAEL DECESARE In September, the AAUP announced an investigation of the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the pandemic. The investigation’s initial focus was on seven institutions; the following month, an eighth was added to the list. Never before in the Association’s 106-year history has a governance…
BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical…
BY BILL BERGMAN The differences between first-year college students and seniors were more pronounced than ever during the fall semester. I had a firsthand glimpse while teaching both a first-year seminar and upper-level marketing classes on campus. While I could never really see the mask-covered faces of first-year students in my classes, their eyes sparkled…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In December, the Northwestern University AAUP chapter released a “Report of the Committee on Northwestern University’s COVID-19 Response,” which was endorsed by the chapter members and more than 100 faculty. Tomorrow, the authors of the report will discuss it in an online session on Tues. Feb. 16 at 5-6pm Central time…