BY KELLY HAND You’re probably all too familiar with the common misperception that academics have a cushy schedule. If you are only in class fifteen or fewer hours per week and do not teach at all during winter, spring, and summer breaks, the assumption is that you can do whatever you want with your abundant…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT Guest blogger Robert A. Scott is President Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus, Adelphi University, and Author, How University Boards Work, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. I was recently part of a team engaged to review a regional teaching university with a new president who wants his institution to become a research university…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The following is an excerpt of my address to graduate students at the University of Rochester commencement. My full remarks are available here. I suspect that one of the reasons that the University asked me to serve as your speaker is that I have had many opportunities to re-invent myself in…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Today the AAUP issued, jointly with Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the following statement on the liberal arts disciplines. Beneath the statement there is an online form that allows you to sign on to show your support. In recent years, the disciplines of the liberal arts, once universally regarded as central to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Joe Knott, one of the Republicans who dominate the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, published an op-ed on May 25 that imagines an alarming future for higher education under the headline “We need more conservative professors. Here’s how we can do that at UNC.” Knott generously declares his support for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This headline is from today’s Wonkette newsletter: Michael Cohen’s Tell-All Book Has Been Cancelled. Sorry, Pulitzer Committee! Wonkette is available at: https://wonkette.com/. It is in the same vein as The Onion but much nastier and unrestrained: that is, I sometimes cringe or flinch right before I laugh out loud—that is, at…
BY MISSY WATSON I’m a teacher and user of standardized English who strives to deconstruct and contest standardized English. My classes regularly feature essays, textbooks, and research studies that reveal the oppressive and discriminatory results of assuming, consciously or not, that standardized English is superior to all other language varieties. Last year, I happened to…
BY JOHN W. LAWRENCE In an article published in the May/June 2018 issue of Academe entitled Student Evaluations of Teaching Are Not Valid, I briefly reviewed the literature on whether student evaluations of teaching (SET) are good measures of teaching effectiveness. They are not. First, SET scores reflect race, gender, age and other biases of…
BY BEN TRACHTENBERG The Godfather famously advised, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Regardless of whether university trustees view faculty as friends, enemies, or something else altogether, they would be wise to pursue greater closeness with the people doing the teaching and research at their favorite campus. In particular, more universities should include…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, May 22, two hundred tenured faculty members at the University of Southern California (USC) released an open letter to the school’s board of trustees calling for the resignation of university President C. L. Max Nikias, saying he had “lost the moral authority to lead” in the wake of revelations that a…