BY ALICE BROWN One of the first articles published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2022 asked, “Who Wants to Be a College President?” Author Eric Kelderman writes that recent changes in higher education have led to a shift in the qualities boards seek in a new president. One change he describes is that…
BY DAVID A. VAREL When I was an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in the early 2000s, our student evaluations were all qualitative. We were asked to write short essays describing our experience in our courses—what worked, what didn’t, what could be improved. It was clear from this design that the chief audience was…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN In November, PEN America, the organization of writers that champions free expression and is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network, released a report warning that “a wave of alarming legislative efforts to limit teaching and learning on topics including racism, sexism,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Matthew Ehrlich’s new book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK, explores the history of two prominent academic freedom cases in the 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His…
BY JASON PHILLIPS Most students do not understand the hierarchy of educators in academia. What they tend to imagine when they talk about professors are tenured, full-time professors. In reality, colleges and universities are predominantly staffed by contingent and adjunct faculty members. According to a 2018 report from the AAUP, “at all US institutions combined,…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Back in November 2020, I posted “What Have We Learned? Lessons from the Last Decade.” I claimed it was the first in a series but I never followed through. I did have a set of issues that I intended to devote a post each to. I wanted to discuss the way “both…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Perhaps fittingly for our time, it is marked by the revelation that on January 10, by a 10-0 vote, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board removed from the middle school curriculum Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, which tells the…
BY DEBORAH BELL, SUSAN DENNISON, SPOMA JOVANOVIC, JESSICA NAVARRO, AND JONATHAN TUDGE As colleges and universities address myriad crises—including enrollment declines, operating changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, questions about the value of a college degree, and the need to mitigate racial tensions on campus—higher education budgets have come under increasing scrutiny, and talk…
BY JOSEPH G. RAMSEY Welcome back to school, faculty—and grad student teachers, too! Wondering how much your teaching labor is subsidizing the rest of your university (in other words: your basic rate of exploitation)? Try this fun back-to-school activity! Locate your school’s per course student tuition rate. (At my public university, in-state tuition per 3…
BY JOHN K. WILSON January 23, 2022 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in what may be the most important legal case protecting academic freedom: Keyishian v. Board of Regents. The poetic words of Justice William Brennan’s majority decision have echoed through our legal system and become a fundamental part of…