The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions. This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to…
About a month ago, Hank Reichman posted on Become a Part-Time Professor: Live and Teach Anywhere You Like by Lesa Hammond. At the end, Reichman suggested that Hammond might want to find out a little more about the real situations of adjuncts and suggested a study she might want to take a look at. Today, Hammond responded.…
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…
It should be crystal clear from my two previous posts (here and here) on the topic that not only do I oppose the recent California Superior Court decision in Vergara v. California, which overturned California statutes guaranteeing “teacher tenure” and layoff by seniority for the state’s K-12 teachers, I have also questioned its legal rationale. …
Yesterday I published a post on this blog entitled “The Vergara Decision and the Threat to Tenure,” in which I discussed the potential direct and indirect impact on higher education of a recent California Superior Court decision voiding the state’s K-12 “teacher tenure” laws and summarizing and excerpting some of the critical response that has…
Last week’s appalling California Superior Court decision in Vergara v. California, which overturned California statutes guaranteeing due process protections for K-12 teachers with more than two years experience (so-called “teacher tenure”) and layoff by seniority, has engendered considerable concern among instructors in higher education. To what extent does this decision threaten the protections of the…
The following is the text of the report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure to the AAUP Annual Meeting, delivered by Committee Chair and AAUP First Vice-President Hank Reichman on June 14. The Committee’s official and complete report will appear as part of the annual Bulletin of the AAUP, published annually in the…
Guest poster Michael McDevitt is professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. He conducts research in political communication and is working on a book, Where Ideas Go to Die: Anti-Intellectualism in American Journalism. His e-mail address is mike.mcdevitt@colorado.edu. The killing of a school is never pleasant—especially when it’s your school—but a…
Thanks to a post on Retraction Watch, I just read an essay by University of Michigan’s Gerald Davis, “Why Do We Still Have Journals?” He concludes: there is room for many kinds of contributions, and it is reasonable for journals and other kinds of outlets to have a division of labor. But it is worth being cognizant…
In his new book, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux writes that, “as public intellectuals, academics can do more.” We know that, of course, but it never hurts to hear it again, especially as the crisis in American education–and, following necessarily, in American society–grows. But what does it mean to be a public intellectual? What, in other…