BY AARON BARLOW For the last few days, I have been immersed in responding to student papers and to their comments on my courses’ online platforms. This has caused me to think anew about what I have learned over the past decade of how students need to be responded to online as compared to in…
BY DAVID KOCIEMBA AAUP clinical faculty are on the front lines of caring for COVID-19 patients. You can help them stay safe while doing so. Members at the AAUP chapters at the University of Connecticut Health Center and at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut (UConn) have formed a joint group of doctors,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Off and on throughout last evening, I checked the results of the election for the seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. If you have not seen the results, here’s how the election turned out: At the beginning of the evening, I was gearing myself up to write a very caustic post,…
BY JUAN COLE Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and editor-in-chief of the Informed Comment blog, from which this is reposted with permission. The surgeon general, Jerome Adams, has announced that the coming week will see enormous numbers of coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations, calling it this…
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 We have been using digital technologies as tools in our pedagogical kits, generally speaking, for a couple of decades. The battle for “smart” classrooms is over; we can’t imagine teaching in an environment where we do not have internet access and immediate projection. We use music and video in the classroom as…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In all sorts of ways and on all sorts of levels, the coronavirus crisis is making the case for the value of a liberal arts education and of general-education courses. As a professor of English, I could make the case for the value of communication skills and, in particular, of writing…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH As musicians and other performing artists cope with the abrupt interruption of their professional lives, clips of bands and orchestras performing together while apart have become, delightfully, much more commonplace. But this video, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the recording of The Band’s signature song, “The Weight,” was released last September,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH If one showed most Americans this photo, they would have no idea who the woman was: If one added this next photo, a few might guess that she was Eleanor Roosevelt, standing in the background as her husband signed another piece of landmark New Deal legislation: But, much like Eleanor Roosevelt,…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement of solidarity with essential workers today: We all have been touched by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Our system of higher education has been upended in the course of only a few weeks. AAUP members in medical school and health center chapters and…