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…
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…
Newly Elected Members of the U.S. House
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,…
Nerd Culture, Unsafe Spaces, and “Free Speech”
BY JAIME WEIDA I have a confession to make: along with being an English professor, I am a huge science fiction nerd. While I spend my time online reading articles and news from the websites for the MLA, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Federation of Teachers, and—of course—the AAUP, I also spend an…