BY DAVID A. VAREL These days, as any job seeker will tell you, universities are prioritizing diversity on their faculties. The way they are conceptualizing it has expanded dramatically over time, now including not only race and gender but also sexual orientation, disability, military service, and many other categories. Yet one omission is especially striking:…
BY THE AAUP On October 28, the AAUP sent a letter to New York University president Andrew Hamilton to express concern about the cancellation by Zoom of an October 23 event hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP and co-sponsored by NYU departments and institutes. The text of the letter appears below. Dear President…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
BY STEVEN LUBET Best known as an essayist and short-story writer, and former editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein retired in 2002 after 30 years in the English Department at Northwestern University. As an emeritus lecturer, however, he still receives university announcements, which recently led him to complain about a decline in teaching standards.…
BY RACHAEL LEHMAN The most important relationship in education is between student and educator (we’ll use the terms professor, faculty, and teacher interchangeably). From the pre–K to doctoral levels, education today is a vestige of colonialism imbued with white supremacy and patriarchy. BIPOC students experience the negative impacts disproportionately of this colonized education system, but…
BY JOHANN NEEM In a recent New York Times column, NYU business school professor Hans Taparia proclaimed (as many have before) that “the future of college is online.” Whenever I hear these words, I think of a student of mine, a dual major in history and anthropology, who testified before my institution’s Board of Trustees…
BY THE COLORADO AAUP CONFERENCE The Colorado Conference of the American Association of University Professors endorsed and promulgated the following statement on May 10, 2020. As Colorado’s universities and colleges ponder the risks and rewards of opening their campuses this fall in the midst of the continuing pandemic, the prospect of renewing normal or even…
BY DEE ANDREWS In History, we often talk about the 5 “C’s” of historical thinking: context, complexity, change, causality, and contingency. That last — the BIG unexpected event – you may have noticed is what we’re going through right now. So that led me to think of a similar scheme for what we’re facing in…
BY AARON BARLOW Those advocating a permanent move online for a much greater proportion of college classes are, I think, purposefully conflating two different needs in their quest. The first is the need for all teachers to be comfortable using digital tools, something we all have been woefully remiss in fulfilling. The second is the…
BY AARON BARLOW The organization Tenure for the Common Good has issued a Statement on Equitiy and Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Follow the link to read the whole of it, but here are the first few paragraphs: The COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges to higher education. Tens of thousands of faculty are suddenly moving…