BY MARK JAMES A year ago, I was called in to meet with my dean after a parent complained to the president’s office that I had been discussing white supremacy in my American and African American literature classes. I wrote about that experience last summer in Inside Higher Ed, and I hoped that would be…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
BY MARIAH QUINN The AAUP has launched a podcast called AAUP Presents, which takes a look at issues such as shared governance, academic freedom, and institutional debt. The first three episodes are available now. The series kicks off with an interview with AAUP president Irene Mulvey, who takes us through some of AAUP’s work this…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT AND CHRISTIAN P. VAUPEL Conflicts between academics and administrators on college campuses have been in the news. Recently, issues of mask mandates, actions taken to reduce expenses due to pandemic-related loss of revenue, and concerns about alleged violations of academic freedom have erupted. What reports about such problems don’t always acknowledge…
BY NICOLE BRAUN It looks like I will have quite a few dogs and cats to care for over the holidays as a lot of folks are going away. I am going to meet some more new furry pals today. But this happened the other day: I went to a potential gig where the couple…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Michael Hobbes, a journalist based in Berlin, has a substack site, “Confirm My Choices,” where he regularly posts commentary on a variety of topics. Today he posted a piece, “Lies, Damn Lies and ‘Self-Censorship’ Statistics,” that really hit the nail on the head about the much-ballyhooed “Campus Free Speech Crisis.” I’m…
BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put…
BY LOUIS HOWARD PORTER Why are we diversifying a profession that exploits a majority of its professionals? What are the consequences of diversifying a profession where many are either forced to leave it, or take jobs as contingent labor making poverty-level wages? Is the consequence of such diversification really “social justice”? Or is it exploitation…
BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE We will need to continue to protect ourselves from COVID-19, probably through spring 2022. Colleges and universities have long been recognized as places of increased risk for communicable diseases. While higher education has benefited from immunization mandates against “childhood diseases” in primary and secondary schools, they have…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF New York Times right-wing opinion writer Ross Douthat led the November 11, 2021, print edition of the editorial pages with “Why We Need New Colleges.” Readers familiar with his fantasy-laden writing will not be surprised. I always shake my head when reading Douthat’s never-documented imaginings, but sometimes, like that day, I…