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Speaking Back When the University is Attacked

BY MARCO ABEL AND JULIA SCHLECK In our recent Academe article, “Academic Freedom, Radical Hospitality, and the Necessity of Counterspeech,” we revisit the incident on UNL’s campus that led to its censure last June to ask what administrations can do when faced with incidents like this one, in which a student advocating for the establishment…

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Opportunities for Early Career Scholars with Disabilities

BY KERI L. RODGERS I am reaching out to share a career development opportunity for doctoral candidates or alumni who have disabilities as well as a service opportunity for faculty members interested in supporting early career scholars with disabilities. Please share this information with anyone who might be interested. Pre-Conference Seminar for Early Career Scholars…

Post-Millennials and Higher Ed

BY MARTIN KICH Consider the following chart: The article from which this graphic is taken, “Early Benchmarks Show ‘Post-Millennials’ on Track to Be Most Diverse, Best-Educated Generation Yet,” has been written by Richard Fry and Kim Parker for Pew Research and is available at: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/11/15/early-benchmarks-show-post-millennials-on-track-to-be-most-diverse-best-educated-generation-yet/?utm. The chart suggests some very positive developments—the increasing diversity of…

A Turkey Poem for Turkey Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On the day before Thanksgiving, the poem featured in the Poem-a-Day newsletter of the Academy of American Poets was Sawako Nakayasu’s prose poem “Deflated Rubber Turkey.” This wonderfully light and yet riddle-like poem is available at: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/deflated-rubber-turkey?utm. Sawako Nakayasu is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. She is…

Academe Explores Gender on Campus through Intersectional Lens

POSTED BY KELLY HAND The new issue of Academe uses the feminist concept of intersectionality to consider gender on campus in relation to race, class, and other categories that shape our understanding of higher education. Contributors reframe problems such as sexual violence, declining access to public education, the vulnerability of contingent faculty, and the exploitation of graduate…

Challenging Calls for Civility

BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets).  Following the election of Donald…

Dispatch From the War About General Education

BY HARRY HELLENBRAND [Ed. note: Harry Hellenbrand was provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).  A little more than a year ago the Chancellor of the California State University system (CSU) issued two executive orders governing general education and remediation. The directives, prepared and released without appropriate faculty input, were immediately controversial,…

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Jailhouse Scholar

BY JAMES FERRY When I submitted my piece for the September-October issue of Academe, “How the Academy Saved My Soul—and Maybe My Life,” I figured that, at best, I might end up guest blogging. So being asked to blog about my feature article feels a bit…weird. I’d much rather blog about why I lacked “contributor…