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Possibilities and Perils of Digital Scholarship for Faculty Performance Requirements

BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…

Group Discussion

Can We Reverse the Trend?

BY AARON BARLOW In response to a recent post of mine, a professor wrote, “We are in a highly competitive and insecure field. How the heck do we rise together?” The competitive nature and insecurity of academia certainly have been exacerbated of the past decades (they were always with us); the only way that is…

Outdoor classroom

On the Tenured and Teaching

BY AARON BARLOW The traditional classroom is an admittedly questionable structure. It limits learning by confining bodies of knowledge within four walls, scuffed floor and ceiling generally too low. It also keeps things out, particularly a world that should have an impact on every type of learning. It reinforces hierarchy: no matter that teachers try…

Computers on a desk.

Too Perfect?

BY AARON BARLOW Maybe it was just too perfect a topic for my classes today. Certainly, though, I couldn’t resist. It had everything. It had: Topicality that would keep students interested; Relationship to our university system (City University of New York); Room for discussion of student value, something particularly important for first-year college students; Relevance,…

Lightbulb on blackboard, surrounded by idea bubble drawings.

Academic Values and Innovation

BY LESLIE BARY Yesterday a public official, dropping the name of the Lumina Foundation, asked Louisiana faculty for ideas on how to innovate. Did we need help learning to use technology? Would mini-grants help us find new books to replace the outdated ones we might be using? Perhaps we do not need books, but teaching…

Those Who Can Do, Can’t Teach

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The title of this post is the title of an op-ed written by Adam Grant and published in the New York Times. Grant is identified as an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandburg,…

The University as Anxiety Machine

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the online journal published by Still Point Spaces, Andrea Brady has written a lengthy, three-part personal essay on the “University as Anxiety Machine.” The essay should resonate with many academics in the U.S., as well as those in other nations. Here is the opening section: It was Welcome Week at…