BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Inside Higher Education just released the 2016 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers, conducted by Gallup and answered by 539 chief academic officers and provosts. In several categories, the results are telling. In a nutshell, almost all respondents stressed the continuing importance of the liberal arts. Interestingly, most recognized…
BY HENRY REICHMAN During his 50+ years on the AAUP staff Jordan E. Kurland, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, must have helped thousands of faculty members resist challenges to their academic freedom. Yet because he never sought the spotlight for himself, Jordan and his remarkable work remained largely unknown to most…
BY AARON BARLOW The reasoning behind the choice of “Media and the Faculty” as the theme of the current issue of Academe can be gleaned from David Daley’s interview on Salon with Jane Mayer about her new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Concerning Lewis Powell who, before being…
In a post to Quartz India, Vivekananda Nemana has reported on the suicide by hanging of Rohith Chakravarthi Vemula, a doctoral student at the University of Hyderabad, which is also known as the Hyderabad Central University. Namana reports: “College students are up in arms across major Indian cities. Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune have witnessed…
There has been a great deal of interest in the Open Syllabus Project, including an article in The New York Times. I thought I’d take a look at it and see what tentative conclusions I could draw (a la Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading) about what is being taught in my field of English in the United States.…
Writing for the website of Channel 10 News in the Tampa Bay-Sarasota metro area, Sarah Hollenbeck has reported on two bills currently being considered in the Florida state legislature that would legalize guns on the campuses of the state’s colleges and universities. Here are the highlights of the article: “Some college leaders estimate the cost…
The following quotations appeared in different parts of CNN’s daily Politics newsletter: “Politics: Trump used to back Hillary, who endorsed Gore, who ran with Lieberman, who endorsed McCain, who picked Palin, who endorsed Trump.” –Tweet by the New York Times‘ Nick Confessore, on the circle of American politics. “It is hard for me to watch…
Protests by and on behalf of students of color on campuses such as Yale University and the University of Missouri have highlighted the need for greater diversity among faculty. While some colleges and universities, including Yale, have committed millions of dollars to diversity initiatives, the obstacles to recruiting and retaining faculty from historically underrepresented…