Last Friday, the Colorado Conference of the AAUP (for which I serve as co-President) held a one-day meeting at Fort Lewis College in Durango devoted to the topic of shared governance. Our thinking behind planning this gathering was that Colorado higher education seemed to be going crazy. So many weird things had been happening at…
In a fascinating op ed in the Boston Globe recently, Andrew W. Lo, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Tom Rutledge, chief investment strategist at Alpha Simplex Group, looked at how the area’s colleges and universities might support Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics. The reaction across Boston to the…
The following is a media release issued today by the Rider University (New Jersey) AAUP: The faculty of Rider University is standing in solidarity at the beginning of the fall as contract negotiations, which started in the summer and continue with little progress being made. The administration has put forth draconian proposals that will negatively…
The influence of outside money on education has always been strong–and fighting it is one of the reasons the AAUP came into existence. Rarely, though, do we educators have real power over the source of that money. In the case of Pearson, however, we can have just that. The company makes a good deal of…
The following paragraphs open a recent post on Dennis Baron’s site The Web of Language: “2014 marks the centennial of World War I, time to take a closer look at one of its offshoots, America’s little-known War on Language. “In April, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. In addition to sending troops to fight…
Diane Ravitch’s Blog includes two items of considerable interest on the topic of the computer grading of essays. In the first post, titled simply “Why Computers Should Not Grade Student Essays” [http://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/03/why-computers-should-not-grade-student-essays-2/], Ravitch chronicles the efforts to create software that can generate essays that the grading software will evaluate as excellent. Although the computer-generated essays…
This is a guest post by Tim Shiell, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Shiell is a Professor of Philosophy and founder and Associate Director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He primarily teaches ethics courses and researches issues at the intersection of law, ethics and…
This morning, through a piece on Salon, I was introduced to an article by fiction-writer Will Self on George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” As I will be teaching that essay Monday in my Specialized Communications for Technology Students class, I was particularly interested in taking a look, especially after reading Salon‘s Laura Miller’s rather negative…
This is a guest post by Jenny Bossaller, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Professor Bossaller teaches library and information science at the University of Missouri. She studies social aspects of information access and use, informed by critical theory and concentrating on social justice. Jenna Kammer, an instructional designer and doctoral student…
This is a guest post by Richard F. Teichgraeber III, a contributor to the newest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom. Teichgraeber is professor of history at Tulane University. His most recent book is Building Culture: Studies in the Intellectual History of Industrializing America, 1867-1910. He is completing work on the introduction and annotation of a new…