BY AARON BARLOW “Peer review,” cried the provost, “that’s the gold standard.” Sometimes it seems like the only standard. And we are being told to grasp it strongly. Why not? It lets us off the hook. Accepting it without question, we can ignore at least a couple of the urgent concerns regarding Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure…
BY SUSAN E. RAMLO Now in my twenty-fifth year of teaching at a public urban university in the Midwest, I research subjective viewpoints mainly using a somewhat obscure, eighty-year-old methodology that has been gaining popularity. Q methodology (Q) is unique in its ability to scientifically study divergent viewpoints in a way that distinguishes and describes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the welcome news arrived that scandal-ridden Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would, as previously hinted, be departing his post by year’s end. The announcement came just days after release of a scathing 38-page report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Science under Siege at the Department of the Interior (DOI), which…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a year ago the AAUP released a report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The report documented “the Trump administration’s alarming hostility to science” in international scientific exchange and the field of climate…
BY ANI KOKOBOBO Guest Blogger Ani Kokobobo is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Slavic Department, at the University of Kansas as well as Editor, Tolstoy Studies Journal. I recently gave a lecture about Leo Tolstoy’s views on sexuality, which was inspired by the contemporary #metoo movement. At the end, a faculty member from the host university…
BY DAVID HILDEBRANDT I am studying the work life of adjunct faculty. You are invited to participate in this research if: You work as an adjunct faculty member. Your place of work is based in the United States of America. This research will help us understand the work life of adjunct faculty. We need your…
BY KELLY HAND The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) recently released a research brief analyzing results of a survey of humanities PhD recipients who were three, eight, and fifteen years out of programs at thirty-five institutions. With a data sample of 882 respondents, the report focuses on PhDs working in academic and nonacademic jobs “closely…
BY MARK HULSETHER In my last post, I argued that “refereed” does not equal good, nor “non-refereed” bad—but rather “refereed or not” and “quality scholarship or not” (alongside other factors) are independent variables with approximately random correlation, at least in the intellectual networks where I do my work. I did not expect to see slam…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This piece is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Many people are worried about the damage the Kavanaugh appointment will do to the Supreme Court and to American politics. I’m worried about the new damage…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week three scholars published an article reporting on how they had submitted over twenty fraudulent and purportedly ridiculous nonsense papers to various journals in gender and diversity studies. Seven were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors “had to take the project public prematurely and…