This is a guest post by Adrianna Kezar and Dan Maxey. Changes in the composition of the American professoriate toward a mostly contingent workforce are raising important questions about poor working conditions for non-tenure-track faculty and connections between these conditions and student learning outcomes. Numerous studies have found the negative working conditions of these faculty have…
A trustee once told me that perception is reality in higher education. The comment didn’t require a response but I wish I had made one. What I should have said is that the truth trumps perception in a world where principle and fairness should always matter most. In fact, the best leaders are not those…
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been getting a lot of attention lately. The idea of free access to higher education via online classes challenges our traditional assumptions about good undergraduate pedagogy–that small class sizes and significant face-to-face time with professors are crucial to learning. As a parent with two kids at private universities, I find…
The November-December issue of Academe looks at faculty service. It is perhaps the most ambiguous of the traditional triad along with teaching and research, and the articles in this issue seek to describe the different ways that faculty conceive of service, and the different ways that service is (or is not) recognized. Read the issue here.…
[This comes from Barbara Bowen of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York and Terrence Martell of the CUNY Faculty Senate.] Dear Colleague: Please click here to sign a petition calling for a moratorium on the implementation of an austerity curriculum at CUNY. And please forward this message widely to…
Back in September 2012, when Governor Jerry Brown of California signed legislation that supports the creation of 50 free textbooks for common undergraduate courses, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) critiqued the idea of free textbooks, suggesting California’s proposal would cost “tens of millions of dollars to develop, distribute and maintain.” More recently, Flatworld Knowledge announced it will no longer…
The pace of change is accelerating within American higher education. The debates raging over MOOC’s, the impact of specific programmatic strategies like Coursera, the role of for-profit providers, and the arguments laid out recently in defense of the liberal arts tradition illustrate this point. The Obama Administration’s efforts to increase access and college-going rates and…
The following is a guest post by Donna Potts, chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences. She is also a contributor to the newest issue of Academe. In this post, she expands on the issues in her Academe article. Watching the movie Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is abducted into the sex trade and heroically…
[Guest Blogger Walter Brasch is a syndicated social issues columnist, the author of 17 books, and a former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. His latest is Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, available at amazon.com, www.greeleyandstone.com, and bookstores. Dr. Brasch was a university professor of mass communications and journalism for 30 years.]…
The 98% of scientists who have been warning of climate change that is perilously close to becoming irreversible have pointed repeatedly to the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. Unfortunately, “global warming” predated “climate change” as the term for this crisis. So, despite considerable video evidence of the ice sheets sliding into the sea, if it…