BY AARON BARLOW Underlying the mania for “assessment” and “accountability” in higher education is an elitist sensibility that, having gone unexamined for too long, has undermined real efforts at providing useful education for everyone, no matter what college or what level. Not only is it creating a two-tiered model of education, but it is changing…
BY GILLIAN STEINBERG When I tell people that I left a tenured university position to teach high school, most suggest that I’ve taken a significant step backwards. But with so many college teachers either underemployed or feeling desperately pressured, more might want to consider the switch to high school teaching. High school teaching is not,…
BY AARON BARLOW The problem isn’t the field, it’s a process that no longer meets its original ends. Yesterday, Hank Reichman posted on a hoax that takes advantage of a flawed process to try to single out a particular field for derision. What follows is merely an addendum, with my own particular slant, to what he…
BY AARON BARLOW An article in Inside Higher Ed by Colleen Flaherty points out something all of us in academic should already know but that many of us conveniently ignore: women, to put it bluntly, are the dogsbodies of most academic departments. Not only that, but I suspect that they teach a disproportionate percentage of…
BY AARON BARLOW When my father returned home from the Pacific after the end of WWII, he found no signs remained of his existence in his parents’ house. His mother, probably fearing he would never return (he was gone for three years), had ‘disappeared’ all of his belongings. He never forgave her for that. This…
BY JOSHUA DOLEZAL Guest blogger Joshua Dolezal is a professor of English at Central College. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Cather Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging (University of Iowa Press, 2014). During my first year at a Christian…
BY J. MICHAEL RIFENBURG Guest blogger J. Michael Rifenburg teaches at the University of North Georgia. This is a letter he sent to the Dahlonega Nugget, the local newspaper in his community. It appeared there recently: I’ve only been a college professor for a decade, but as 2017 begins, I feel my colleagues and I are under attack…
BY MARTIN KICH If poetry is at its core the effort to give expression to the inexpressible aspects of our experience, then science is often a kind of poetry, or at least provides a complement to the poetic impulse. For science provides both a fundamental challenge to all simplistic notions about our existence and a…
