BY ALAN SINGER In times of crisis, academics must be public intellectuals. Why invest our lives in becoming experts in history, society, policy, science, or any other field of study and then remain isolated in an academic cocoon for safety or career advancement? The consequences of silence for our profession and our society are too…
BY JONATHAN REES I swear the first time I heard about AI in the way that that term is being used lately is when John Oliver married a cabbage. Then, because this was before the great Twitter exodus happened, just about everyone in my feed started posting absolutely ridiculous essays they got when they started…
BY JILL R. EHNENN AND CAROLYN BETENSKY Over the past few weeks, three scholars from political science and English departments—Corey Robin (political science, Brooklyn College and CUNY), Ted Underwood (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Eleanor Courtemanche (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)—have offered incisive and poignant reflections on what ChatGPT means to them, and us,…
BY ADRIANNA KEZAR, JOHN W. CURTIS, EMILY KOREN, AND KC CULVER The answer to the question our title poses is not very much—yet. There are serious challenges facing higher education in the United States today, from efforts to restrict teaching “uncomfortable” subjects to new and repeated attacks on tenure and the persistent underfunding of colleges,…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Rutgers Unions Prepare to Surf the Strike Wave,” Hank Kalet wrote for the blog about the authorization-to-strike vote to be held at Rutgers. The vote was held and 94 percent of Rutgers AAUP-AFT members voted “yes.” Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway has been using scare tactics to intimidate the Rutgers community. In…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN During the recent landmark strike by some 48,000 graduate student employees in the University of California system, many Senate (tenure-track) faculty members chose to honor picket lines in various ways. Such sympathy actions are legal, but employers are entitled under the law to dock the pay of anyone who does not…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…
BY RACHEL WHEELER For my sanity, I’ve had to cut back on my doom-scrolling habit and limit my time on Twitter. But there’s one type of content I’m totally there for: over the course of spring semester—our fifth pandemic semester—as more faculty ventured back into physical classrooms and back to in-person conferences and lectures, what…