BY LAURA W. PERNA According to a January 2020 Gallup poll, only 27 percent of adults in the United States believe that college is affordable. Democratic presidential candidates have responded to these concerns with proposals for free tuition at community colleges, student loan debt-forgiveness, and more. Some proposals, like increasing the amount of money that…
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…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK Winter 2020 | Vol. 106, No. 1 Contributors to this issue of Academe articulate a broad vision of higher education’s social mission. Articles focus on addressing the needs of working, low-income, and incarcerated students; victories in coalitional student-led organizing; institutional reckonings with the legacy of slavery; and other topics. Follow the links…
BY OLGA GARCÍA ECHEVERRÍA This creative essay was inspired by Jane Harty’s Academe Blog post “Stress and PTSD in the Academy” and modeled after Judy Brady’s 1971 satirical feminist essay “I Want a Wife.” I belong to a category of workers known as adjuncts. I am an adjunct. According to the Oxford online dictionary, an…
BY STEVE MUMME AND CAPRICE LAWLESS This op-ed appeared originally in the Boulder Daily Camera [openforum@dailycamera.com]. It’s indicative of the dire state in which Colorado’s Community College System adjunct instructors now labor that the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado branch launched a Christmas season GoFundMe campaign to help tide them through the annual…
BY AARON BARLOW Dr. Bruce Gilley, are you trying to pick a fight? You are a professor of Political Science at Portland State University and have penned a disturbing piece, “Was It Good Fortune to be Enslaved by the British Empire?” that appeared on September 30, 2019 on the website of the National Association of…
BY DANE KENNEDY The George Washington University faculty and staff ain’t got no culture. Or worse, we’ve got a negative culture. This was the verdict of the Disney Institute, which the president of our university commissioned last year to assess the culture on our campus. Fortunately, the institute, which is the “professional development and external…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today is Student Press Freedom Day, which promotes the importance of protecting the rights of student journalists. Today was also the start of questioning in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, where a key issue has been Trump’s extraordinary efforts to obstruct Congress and silence government employees by banning them from revealing the truth…
BY JOHN K. WILSON When the Annals of Internal Medicine published an article last fall declaring no serious evidence linked eating red meat to health problems, it sparked enormous controversy and criticism from many experts in the field. Now, the critics are being attacked. In an open letter headlined, “Texas A&M Chancellor Calls on Harvard to…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE The higher education news from China late last year was chilling to all who value academic freedom. Three major universities—Fudan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi Normal—under the direction of the government’s Ministry of Education, deleted “freedom of thought” from their charters and added pledges to follow Communist Party leadership, according to reports from Reuters.…