BY JEFF BAKER The word overload can have more than one meaning to higher education faculty. It can mean increasing class size or adding additional course sections to the faculty member’s required minimum teaching load. While many full-time faculty welcome overloads as an opportunity to increase income, they are usually a bad deal. Adjunct…
BY AARON BARLOW When you rely on the numbers, you count out the people. How often have we heard that? How frequently do we remind ourselves that it’s the people—in our case as educators, the students—who matter most, the individuals and not the numbers that reflect the aggregate? Yet our actions continue to be toward…
BY KELLY HAND The AAUP released its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession on April 11. This year’s report, “Higher Education at a Crossroads,” puts into perspective data that demonstrate a modest increase in compensation for full-time faculty even as the percentages of tenured and tenure-track faculty have decreased over the past four…
BY AARON BARLOW Yesterday, for April Fools Day, I posted Gig University, an only slightly satiric look at where some people would like higher education to head. It presents a reductivist vision of humanity and human possibilities. We—or, at least, the masses of us—become nothing more than material to be processed or cogs to fit…
There’s no point in continuing college and university structures as they have existed for over a century. They’re too expensive, inefficient and poorly focused. An entire culture has built up around them, including assumptions about the experience, the faculty and the outcome. These can all be swept away without materially affecting the quality of instruction…
Statement on “Academic Analytics” and Research Metrics The following statement was approved by the Executive Committee of the AAUP Council at its March meeting: Recently a number of colleges and universities have contracted with independent private companies to provide allegedly “objective” quantitative information about faculty scholarly “productivity.” Among the most prominent of these “metrics providers”…
There has been a great deal of interest in the Open Syllabus Project, including an article in The New York Times. I thought I’d take a look at it and see what tentative conclusions I could draw (a la Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading) about what is being taught in my field of English in the United States.…