BY AARON BARLOW We’re learning a lot about distance education right now. As a group, that is, as faculty. Few of us have ever bothered with using digital tools, much less considered teaching solely online or even in a hybrid situation. We’ve assumed, correctly, that distance education is a pale approximation of learning without electronic…
BY NOAH ZATZ The following is reposted with permission from The Faculty Lounge. Noah Zatz is professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. The post is edited lightly from a letter to the UCLA administrative and faculty leadership, and posted on his Facebook page. I am of the firm and strong view that…
BY KAITLIN POMERANTZ The following is reposted with permission from Hyperallergic, “a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society.” Kaitlin Pomerantz is an artist and educator in Philadelphia. In the short story “Swim Team,” by Miranda July, the protagonist teaches a group of people in a land-locked town to swim without…
BY AARON BARLOW Listen to our students. That’s the best way for us teachers to craft a successful end to a disrupted semester in a nation in crisis. After Kent State in 1970, we students at Utica College (like our contemporaries all over the country) shut our campus down. Under the leadership of faculty, however,…
BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…
BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions…
![Abhi Sharma from India [CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]](https://i0.wp.com/academeblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Books_HD_8314929977.jpg?resize=220%2C126&ssl=1)
BY AARON BARLOW Oh, the fear of losing relevance! Responding to a Chronicle Review collection of essays on the demise of traditional studies in English called Endgame, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in “The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith” (01/11/20), expresses the worries of some: [O]ur…
BY AARON BARLOW At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we…
BY AARON BARLOW Another professor, this time an Eric Rasmusen who teaches business and economics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is being raked over the coals for a Tweet. This one was particularly stupid (in my view—and certainly for a teacher with classroom responsibilities for a diverse body of students). Rasmusen is…