David Brooks wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times the other day called “The Big University.” It’s not a bad piece: It argues that the humanities are a necessary underpinning for professional specialization and points out “four important tasks” for institutions wanting to move back toward a position where “they leave a mark…
By an overwhelming 39-5 vote the Louisiana State University (LSU) Faculty Senate today (October 6) voted to censure three top administrators for their roles in the dismissal of tenured professor Teresa Buchanan for allegedly creating a hostile environment in classes with sexually explicit jokes. LSU Baton Rouge has been on the AAUP’s list of censured…
John Wilson and April Kelly-Woessner have been having a very thought-provoking exchange on the relative tolerance or intolerance evident in the views of today’s young adults in comparison to earlier generations at that age. Somewhere in the mix of all of these issues, one probably has to account for the broader cultural influence of a…
By April Kelly-Woessner I would like to thank John K. Wilson for sending me his comments about my HeterodoxAcademy blog and inviting me to respond. There are a lot of points to cover. First, John K. Wilson disputes my finding that young people today are less tolerant than their parents. He claims “young people only…
Last week I posted an item reporting on the bargaining efforts of two AAUP/AAUP-CBC affiliated faculty unions, the California Faculty Association (CFA) in the California State University system and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) in the City University of New York. Now comes word that the AAUP’s own collective bargaining chapter at the Connecticut State…
The following was reported last month in The New York Times: It is well established that unions provide benefits to workers — that they raise wages for their members (and even for nonmembers). They can help reduce inequality. A new study suggests that unions may also help children move up the economic ladder. Researchers at…
After a gunman opened fire last week at an Oregon community college, killing 9 and wounding 10, President Obama bemoaned the “routinization” of our response. Oregon, it must be noted, is one of seven states that now have provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public post-secondary campuses. Gun rights advocates like the NRA…
Each week during the NFL season, Business Insider publishes power rankings not just of the NFL teams but of the quarterbacks leading those teams. This fall, Business Insider has started publishing weekly power rankings of the presidential candidates, complete with the candidate’s polling averages nationally and in the earliest primary states, as well as an…
That’s the title of a thoughtful essay that appeared last week in the Boston College (BC) student newspaper, The Heights. Student Sean Sudol’s topic is student leadership. He begins with an expression of pride in one of his professor’s comments that to find leadership on a college campus you should look to student organizations, but…
Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor at Tufts University, has been a professor of German, Judaic studies and biblical literature and is a former provost of Tufts. In an article that first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine, and is now available on the web under the title “Tenure:…