BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL A hotly debated topic making the rounds in higher education now is whether American colleges and universities – public and private – face a round of mergers and acquisitions over the next several years. There are a number of reasons that the discussion of this topic had gained momentum. Tuition discount…
BY HANK REICHMAN My twitter feed was humming this morning with reaction to an article published in Skeptic Magazine, by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They managed to submit a hoax article — “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” — to a journal they purported to be about gender studies and quickly celebrated this achievement…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On May 4, a judge ruled in favor of Marquette University, taking the extraordinary step of granting summary judgment against professor John McAdams, who currently faces permanent suspension without any due process for having the wrong opinions about his earlier suspension. I have been an expert witness in the McAdams…
BY HANK REICHMAN The California State University (CSU) system has hired new managers at more than double the rate of other employees over the past decade at salaries growing twice as fast as those of faculty members and support staff. The administration of the University of California (UC) system pays salaries and benefits to top managers…
BY APRIL FORD I’ve been on the job market since January. That’s no time at all in academe time, and already two-thirds of the applications I’ve sent out, at an average of ten per week, have met form-letter deaths. My favorite rejection so far addresses me as “Sir Ford,” and closes with “good luck out…
BY RENATA KOBETTS MILLER Guest blogger Renata Kobetts Miller is an associate professor of English at the City College of New York, where she teaches Victorian literature. She recently concluded being chair of her department, and this summer she will become deputy dean of Humanities and the Arts. As a working mother, she reflects here on…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, an ad hoc committee of the Northwestern University faculty senate issued a report (pdf) addressing the cases of Laura Kipnis and the censorship of Atrium magazine. Kipnis, who was accused of retaliation for writing about a sexual harassment case on campus, has written a book about her experience, Unwanted…
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BY AARON BARLOW Charles Murray is a complicated figure. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), he married into a wealthy Thai family and spent time in the countryside as a PCV there during the 1960s. That type of experience, as any RPCV can tell you (as I can tell you), is formative. Immersion into another…
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…