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…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN Melissa Click, who called for “some muscle” to thwart student academic freedom to film an on-campus anti-racism protest at the University of Missouri, is now on the faculty of Gonzaga University. According to the Chicago Tribune, Professor Click has a one-year appointment in the undergraduate communication studies department. She is listed on their website at the Roman…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE On Thursday, I posted Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s rejoinder to Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of their book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Academe, May-June 2016, 47-50). Below is Maisto’s and Kahn’s response to Bérubé’s and Ruth’s rejoinder. Please continue this important conversation in the Comments section at the bottom of the page.…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE The May-June issue of Academe included Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s 2015 book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments. What follows is a rejoinder from Bérubé and Ruth. A response from Maisto and Kahn will be published on this blog shortly. We are…