The theme for the current issue of Academe, “Media and the Faculty,” was selected to encourage us to get more involved in the public debates surrounding higher education. As I write in my “From the Editor” column: we have to become our own advocates. Joining the AAUP, of course, is a first step, but each of…
Protests by and on behalf of students of color on campuses such as Yale University and the University of Missouri have highlighted the need for greater diversity among faculty. While some colleges and universities, including Yale, have committed millions of dollars to diversity initiatives, the obstacles to recruiting and retaining faculty from historically underrepresented…
Years ago, before I even thought about teaching as a full-time and permanent career, I spent a few semesters working for an online “university.” I won’t call what I did “teaching.” After all, the institution didn’t. I was a “facilitator” responsible for a section or two of the required Composition course. It had been designed…
Yesterday, in her speech endorsing the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin referred to our need to resist inserting ourselves military into all of the many “squirmishes” occurring around the world. Yesterday, on ESPN’s Around the Horn, Woody Paige referred to the controversy surrounding the fans’ election of a hockey enforcer as an all-star…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative group that has advocated increased activism by college and university trustees and a “return” to “traditional” curricula in Western Civilization and American military, constitutional, and diplomatic history (let’s put aside for now that, given the recent behavior of most trustee boards, these two goals may…
This is a guest post by Greg Loving and Jeff Cramerding, authors of the article, “Five Rules for Dealing with the Media,” in the new January-February 2016 issue of Academe. Greg Loving is associate professor of philosophy at University of Cincinnati Clermont College and president of the UC AAUP chapter. Jeff Cramerding serves as director of contract…
In June, Kate Briguelet, writing for the Daily Beast, reported on the death of Sam DuBose, 43. Dubose had been pulled over by a University of Cincinnati campus police officer Ray Tensing about a mile from the campus because his automobile was missing a front license plate. The campus police have a “mutual aid” agreement…
The Charles Koch Foundation has offered Western Carolina University a gift of $2 million in order to establish a Center of Free Enterprise. Mark Jamison, the retired postmaster of Webster, North Carolina, has an excellent op-ed piece in the Smoky Mountain News opposing the donation. He writes: The proposed $2 million gift from the Charles…
Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University has assembled a good selection of links demonstrating that Martin Luther King Jr. was no “passive radical.”
A middle school teacher reflects on high stakes testing as a supposed “civil rights” issue. Worth reading.