University of Illinois Administration Again Rejects Faculty Panel in Wake of Salaita Firing
The Hiring Policies and Processes Review Committee is a faculty committee impaneled last October by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty senate and Provost Phyllis M. Wise. It has recommended the University of Illinois System Board of Trustees no longer approve new faculty hires and cease all personnel decision-making below the position of an…
If They Keep Repeating It, Then It Must Be True
Why are the Far Right criticisms of Progressives almost always retreads? (Much like their “new” proposals for promoting broadly shared prosperity and political inclusion, which have never seem to have been implemented quite purely or thoroughly enough to produce results even remotely close to those that have been promised—or so the repeated rationalization of their…
In the Absence of Satisfying Facts—or Any Facts at All
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…
ASEEES Responds to Cohen Controversy
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…
Resolution on Non-Tenure Track Faculty and Shared Governance
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.…
Becoming Intentional About Student Life
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…
Neil Postman Always Rings Twice
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…
Neologisms from the "Blizzard of 2015"
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…
The Troubling Case of Professor Stephen Cohen and the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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…