BY KRIS BOUDREAU AND MARK RICHMAN In her recent survey of a handful of research universities that have improved conditions for their teaching faculty—particularly those that provide job stability and paths for professional advancement—the Chronicle’s Becky Supiano suggests that while such a “teaching track” distinct from a tenure track can “elevate undergraduate instruction and the…
BY THOMAS J. PFAFF There is no shortage of articles addressing challenges and issues with shared governance on campuses. COVID-19 has accelerated the situation, as noted in an AAUP report that states, “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the most serious challenges to academic governance in the last fifty years.” The Chronicle also reports on this in…
BY DIANA C. SILVERMAN The poverty crisis in universities today has reached hallucinatory proportions. Fifty-eight percent of students were experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness, in a survey of 200,000 students at 202 different institutions of higher education in the year 2020 by Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. At the…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The education gag orders sweeping red states are being challenged in the courts on First Amendment grounds. This makes sense and we must hope that all such challenges prove effective. The reality, though, is that the anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation directly attacks academic freedom. As AAUP President Irene Mulvey recently tweeted…
BY HOLLY HASSEL, KIRSTI COLE, AND JOANNE BAIRD GIORDANO Two recently published pieces purport to offer advice to academics about how to be successful in the profession. Jason Brennan, commenting on his new book, Good Work If You Can Get It, argued in a May 2020 interview, “For one, most service work is not worth…
BY Z. W. TAYLOR AND PATRICIA SOMERS Only a few decades after the 1789 signing of the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sat on the board of visitors for the University of Virginia. Both Jefferson and Madison, originalists and contributors to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, supported the University of Virginia…
BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s biennial meeting last month I had occasion to pick up a copy of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education, by UC Berkeley education professor John Aubrey Douglass and a group of other contributors. The book is a collection of essays treating the impact on…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF We live in a new age of division. Universities are so often centers of differences, contradictions, and clashes between knowledge and ignorance. One revealing site is the false opposition of the faculty and the—to faculty and academic administration—second-class “professionals” in departments of student affairs and student life. Critically, this dichotomy parallels…
BY RANDI SHEDLOSKY-SHOEMAKER Learning—in all of its forms—represents some change in behavior or thoughts based on direct or indirect experiences. Of course, the range of experiences we can directly access might be limited for a variety of reasons. That’s where books, or more broadly narratives, can provide a pathway to a reality beyond the one…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court issued one of the most important rulings protecting free speech on campus in the case of Healy v. James. As the conservative Supreme Court has proven this week, even a fifty-year precedent is not safe if five justices decide to…