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The Academic Publishing System’s Most Pointless Bottleneck

BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN Peer-reviewed scholarship remains the central currency of academic life. It advances careers, drives innovation, informs policy, stimulates economies, and lays the groundwork for the next generation of inquiry. Yet the very system designed to vet and disseminate knowledge increasingly drains enthusiasm from scholars—especially early-career investigators—by subjecting them to burdensome, time-consuming, and…

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The Three-Legged Stool

BY YASHA HARTBERG Across the country, the foundations of academic freedom and shared governance are under strain. Legislatures are rewriting university missions. Boards are bypassing faculty senates to close programs, mandate ideological “balance,” and discipline professors for political speech, real or imagined. Even at institutions once thought insulated from such incursions, the authority of faculty…

A Few Thoughts on the Last Week

BY MATTHEW BOEDY The last week I have been around the world on Zoom interviews. From Australia news to Europe to the United States in every time zone. I had to turn down Chinese state TV. And I also had a series of awkward attempted dialogues with students. Not just about the events of the…

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From Burnout to Belonging: Redefining Contingent Faculty in the Pursuit of Academic Prestige

BY KATHLEEN M. ROMERO There is an undeniable level of prestige associated with achieving a Carnegie Classified level one research (R1) label for institutions of higher education. This status opens new doors to funding, innovation, and research opportunities, and elevates universities to an elite level. Achieving R1 status rebrands universities, offering the perception of a…

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Higher Education Exile and Resilience

BY MATTHEW BOEDY Amid our new national situation that officially began this week I hope readers of this blog find useful two books published this month.Asking you to forgive the self-promotion, I note from the start that I have chapters in both. The first book is about exile, specifically in higher education. The collection of…

Two men and two women sit on chairs in front of a large window holding colorful speech bubble posters over their faces.

Defending Faculty Members’ Role as Public Intellectuals

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…

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College Professors Aren’t Going to Be Replaced by AI

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…

Regional Faculty Cooperation Matters

BY MATTHEW BOEDY This week I am heading to Baton Rouge to speak to our AAUP colleagues in the Pelican State. My message to be developed in my keynote for the state conference meeting will be: no one is coming to save us and so we have to do much more to save ourselves. I…

Put Democracy in The Community

By MATTHEW BOEDY Last month I encouraged faculty to put democracy on the syllabus. In that post, I wrote: “No one is coming to save us. We all have to do this together.” To further that call, I urge faculty now to put democracy in the community. AAUP unions and advocacy conferences do a lot…

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ChatGPT and Academic Labor

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,…

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