BY LOIS K. COX AND KATHERINE H. TACHAU The actuality of the Iowa legislative session makes the time a few months ago when we wrote “The Erosion of Support for Education and Tenure in Iowa” for the winter 2023 issue of Academe seem halcyon in contrast. Our fears for the future of public education in…
BY PATRICIA NAVARRA “Employers threatening to cut off benefits is not uncommon, but actually doing it is,” offered Bethany Kosmicki, Temple University Graduate Students Association (TUGSA) past president and member of the negotiating committee, as she discussed the TUGSA strike with National Public Radio. Yet health care benefits were deactivated for graduate teaching assistants this…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN This blog has regularly posted items in support of faculty and students resisting attacks on academic freedom at universities in Turkey (see, for examples, here, here, and here; see also from Academe magazine, Fall 2019, here). Now Turkish universities are facing another crisis: the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that hit…
BY JORDAN HARPER AND ADRIANNA KEZAR In the winter 2023 issue of Academe, our article “Reprofessionalizing the Faculty” highlights campuses that are making systemic changes to better support non-tenure-track faculty, including Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Penn State, and the University of Denver. These institutions provided insights into why supporting non-tenure-track faculty is advantageous for student success…
BY HANK REICHMAN Tenure and the tenure system are again in the news. It is therefore fitting that the latest issue of Academe is devoted to tenure—what it is, what it isn’t, how to defend it, and how we can and must improve it. My own contribution, “Eight Myths about Tenure,” sums up a few…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic freedom. We need to look at what has happened to the sanctity of…
BY THE NORTH DAKOTA UNIVERSITY SYSTEM COUNCIL OF COLLEGE FACULTIES Below is a letter from the Council of College Faculties Executive Committee to the chair, Austen Schauer, and members of the Government and Veterans Affairs Committee of the North Dakota state legislature regarding House Bill 1446, followed by the text of a resolution the council…
BY BILL BERGMAN Recently, I participated in an experiment that had several first-year seminar (FYS) instructors attend each other’s classes. It was an effort to see if we could improve our teaching techniques by observing colleagues. My first visit was to a FYS class in physics. Surprisingly, this ninety-minute first-year science class not only taught…
BY STEVE EASTON This blog post, which we are publishing without any changes, was submitted by the author in response to a January 26 post by John K. Wilson. The author wishes to note that the post expresses his personal views, not the views of his institution or the system that it is a part…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The rejection of the College Board’s AP course in African American Studies is only the latest in a series of disturbing news relating to education coming out of Florida. Other examples include the January 18 statement from the presidents of the twenty-eight institutions in the Florida College System declaring they will not…