On January 29, this was the lead headline on the NBC Nightly News newsfeed: “Malaysia Airlines MH370 Declared an ‘Accident,’ Search for Survivors Ends.” On the surface, this headline is absurd in at least two very obvious ways. First, how can the loss of the plane be declared an “accident” when no one has located…
On Friday, the Executive Committee of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) posted on the Association’s website a “clarification” of its position on the controversial rejection by the Association’s board of a sizeable donation from the KAT Foundation to fund dissertation fellowships and to be named for Professor Stephen Cohen and…
This is a guest post from Karen Davis, a lecturer in cinematic arts at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a statewide academic senator. On January 23, the Academic Senate of the California State University unanimously passed AS-3199/FA: Non Tenure Track Faculty and Shared Governance in the California State University: A Call to Campus Senates.…
If the residential learning experience continues to define a wide range of traditional higher education settings, then college leadership – including faculty – must become far more intentional about it. At the moment, there are two principal levels of influence dominating the residential part of the learning experience. The first is the presumed social contract…
After my mother died, in cleaning out her house I went through my father’s old books, pulling out the ones that I might find of use in my own writing and teaching. Among those was a dusty paperback of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I returned to it recently, remembering it from…
Bombogenesis: a scientific term that the Weather Channel has popularized because it combines suggestions of the destructive power of heavy ordinance and associations with the Biblical story of the origins of life—that is, it suggests re-creation out of the maelstrom. Here is the explanation from the Weather Channel’s website: “Bombogenesis. The word sounds ominous, but…
Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship. One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the…
The Center for Constitutional Rights has been providing legal counsel to Professor Steven Salaita who returned a signed contract to teach in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tomorrow this intrepid organization is announcing a press call to inform the public of a “new development” in the Salaita summary dismissal case. I presume…
Dennis Cariello, a lawyer and former US Department of Education senior administrator writing in The Hill this week, offered a sober and troubling assessment of the growing college debt crisis. In his article, Mr. Cariello notes that American colleges and universities face heightened financial pressures as the Great Recession sputters to an end. He reports that…
John Wilson’s post containing the letter from the national AAUP to the Marquette administration somewhat clarifies several of the issues with McAdams—that is, clarifies the issues without presuming to resolve them. The university’s position has become that McAdams has repeatedly referred to students by name in his personal blog or other public communications–not simply that…