BY AARON BARLOW If you want to teach students to think, you have to challenge them—challenge their beliefs and assumptions. Confirming what they (or their parents, or their communities) already believe does not serve that purpose. You also need to teach students to be honest with themselves and to examine their own beliefs by standards…
Shortly after the 2016 election, the AAUP warned that we could be facing the greatest threat to academic freedom since the McCarthy period. It now appears that such a warning was not misplaced. Extremists in the administration, Congress, and several state houses have created an atmosphere in which “alternative facts” reign supreme, and which encourages the introduction of legislation that threatens the core principles of our democracy.
BY JOERG TIEDE If teachers do not stand fighting in the front rank for freedom of intelligence, the cause of the latter is well-nigh hopeless, and we are in for that period of intimidation, oppression, and suppression that goes, and goes rightly, by the name of Fascism and Nazi-ism. — John Dewey, 1935 The American Association of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Fox News’s Tucker Carlson once had a totally undeserved reputation as some sort of “thoughtful” and urbane conservative. But check out the latest from this button-down bigot: TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): If you’ve been awake at any point in the last 50 years, you know that American colleges are basically pretty liberal. But…
BY DAVID CORTRIGHT, ASHER KAUFMAN, GEORGE LOPEZ, ANN MISCHE, ATALIA OMER, JASON SPRINGS, SUSAN ST. VILLE, AND ERNESTO VERDEJA The statement shared below was crafted by a group of faculty members at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies during the first week of the new administration, as we watched the foundational values of our…
BY AARON BARLOW Two great failings of the American professoriate are timidity and self-righteousness. Casting about to orient myself in my new calling a decade or so ago, I found David Horowitz defining one extreme view of it and Michael Bérubé standing out on the other. Horowitz was pushing professors further into timidity and inaction…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Last week, National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and Commonfund released their report on the endowment performance of the 805 colleges and universities who responded to their survey. The outlook was fairly dismal and sheds light on the precarious foundation on which American higher education’s financial model is…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an open letter to Cleveland Clinic Director Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, who happens to be a Trump adviser, signed by over 1,500 (and counting) medical students, faculty and related personnel. Dear Dr. Cosgrove, On January 27th, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order indefinitely banning Syrian…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There is plenty of data suggesting that education, particularly a college or university degree, leads to higher incomes. Less is known about the impact of higher education — and specific schools — on socioeconomic mobility, that is, moving from one “rung” of the income ladder to another. A new study by…
BY DAVID P. NALBONE This is a guest post by David P. Nalbone, associate professor of social psychology at Purdue University Northwest. He is the past president and external liaison of the Purdue University Northwest AAUP chapter and was just elected secretary of the Indiana AAUP conference. My article in the January–February issue of Academe,…