BY HANK REICHMAN Responding to the Trump administration’s decision to replace the National Commission on Forensic Science with an in-house law enforcement task force and a yet-unnamed adviser, four prominent associations of scientists, led by the 120,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), on June 9 called on the Justice Department to reverse…
BY MERILEE MADERA Merilee Madera is a doctoral student in Northeastern University’s Ed.D. program. A research study exploring the experiences of women who have undergone gender inequality during their pursuit of academic leadership positions is being conducted. You may be eligible to participate if you: are employed by a Research Doctoral institution as defined by…
BY AARON BARLOW The problem isn’t the field, it’s a process that no longer meets its original ends. Yesterday, Hank Reichman posted on a hoax that takes advantage of a flawed process to try to single out a particular field for derision. What follows is merely an addendum, with my own particular slant, to what he…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL There is some truth to the saying that those who fail to learn from the past will be doomed to repeat it. Essentially, this was the message that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers delivered recently as part of his larger concern that Massachusetts not become complacent despite U.S. unemployment hitting a…
BY ERNST BENJAMIN Ernst Benjamin served the AAUP as general secretary (1984-1994) and in several other roles. A former Wayne State University faculty member, he is the author of numerous articles on academic freedom and other higher education issues and has edited three books, most recently Academic Collective Bargaining (with Michael Mauer). Discussions of threats to…
BY AARON BARLOW Anyone who teaches at a community college, an urban state university or almost anywhere outside of the top research institutions has run across it: We are not the equals of the scholars at Harvard, the University of Chicago and others of their ilk. Nor are we quite the teachers they are; our…
BY MARTIN KICH In an article published by Smithsonian Magazine, Megan Gambino interviews data journalist Ben Blatt on his recent efforts to apply data analysis to literary works. Here are the opening paragraphs of Gambino’s article, which frame the interview: In most college-level literature courses, you find students dissecting small portions of literary classics: Shakespeare’s…
BY AARON BARLOW Retraction Watch, one of my all-time favorite blogs, posted an interview today with psychologist John Antonakis, who had identified the five diseases of academic publishing, significosis, neophilia, theorrhea, arigorium and disjunctivitis. I was immediately struck by the first: Significosis is the incessant focus on producing statistically significant results, a well-known problem but one…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL News reports last week that President Trump’s first budget may eliminate support for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has alarmed many of humanities supporters and scholars. But the de-funding of the NEH – or the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) — should…
BY ZACHARY M. SCHRAG This is a cross-post of a blog post by Zachary M. Schrag, who published it on his Institutional Review Blog. Schrag, a professor of history at George Mason University, was one of the authors of a 2013 report by a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Regulation of…