BY AARON BARLOW What’s the point of having academic credentials if you can’t use them? Sure, we make them into bludgeons inside the ivory tower, but that’s really just child’s play: the bludgeons do all the real damage of balloons. Only when there is ‘real-world’ application can they have an impact, do they really mean…
Discussion, at least via social media, is growing relating to the evolving caste system in higher education and the real meaning (that is, the actual impact) of academic freedom. Many of the basics—the shrinking tenure-track/tenured faculty, the contractual limitations to codified academic freedom—have been bandied about so much that they are now almost clichés. The…
In a comment on a post of mine yesterday, someone wrote: “Adequate teaching” of any subject (humanities and social sciences included) requires: – decent texts; – teachers who understand their subjects and can explain them to students in lectures, quiz sections and seminar discussions; – relevant homework assignments and reviews; and – being perceptive to…
“My name is legion: for we are many.” Maybe that’s the faculty on Twitter these days. Including many who get themselves into ticklish situations—with no savior casting their devilish tweets into swine and herding them into oblivion in the sea. Yet they have sent themselves to Decapolis to publish, going home on their own. Maybe…
1) Academic freedom is not to be compromised in collective bargaining agreements and faculty handbooks that perfunctorily affirm an institutional commitment to defend academic freedom, yet declare the faculty has a responsibility to be civil, accurate and professional in all matters. Conditionality in academic freedom statements is a ruse to sanction those who deviate from the…
Martin Kich began the month with ruminations on “branding”: What my institution and others like it aspire to is to have name recognition equivalent to that of the most prestigious institutions in the country, or, failing that, approaching that of the institutions with the most successful athletic programs in the nation. It is a Sisyphean…
[For the previous month, February, go here.] Hank Reichman began the month by considering the decline of shared governance at Ft. Lewis College, exemplified by a change in course structure in relation to creits: shared governance is the issue at FLC and it is an issue that should concern faculty everywhere. To be sure, the…
Donald Lazere’s new book is Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias. I interviewed him via email about his book. JW: Your book’s title is provocative, but is it true? Do you really believe that higher education should have a leftist bias? Your pedagogical model is Gerald Graff’s Teach the Conflicts, and you are…
Matthew Abraham’s new book, Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine, examines intellectual freedom and the Israel-Palestine debate in America. Illinois Academe editor John K. Wilson conducted this interview via email with Abraham, who has served on the Illinois AAUP Council and the Illinois AAUP’s Committee A.
Guest blogger Jeanne Zaino is professor of political science and international studies at Iona College. In his provocative and deeply depressing The Last Professors Frank Donoghue warns that corporate logic has taken over the academy. His findings are confirmed by Andrew DeBlanco who, in his award winning College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be not…