BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL It’s enlightening to watch what issues surface when the subject of college faculty arises in the public arena. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose experience in higher education is minimal, offered her first substantive comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week when she called out faculty for silencing free speech:…
BY JOSHUA DOLEZAL Guest blogger Joshua Dolezal is a professor of English at Central College. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Cather Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging (University of Iowa Press, 2014). During my first year at a Christian…
BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest blogger Galen Leonhardy teaches at Black Hawk College. For those who don’t know, we’ve had a recent hullabaloo at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. I’ve written before about how American authoritarianism plays out at my small community college in the heartland, but this most recent episode provides a tale especially worth…
POSTED BY JOERG TIEDE The following resolution was adopted by the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on April 17, 1971. Misconceptions of tenure are commonplace. For many groups and individuals tenure has become a conveniently simple explanation for what they perceive as a variety of educational ills. Tenure is not the…
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…