When Did “Spring Break” Become an Occasion for “Adult” or Family Vacations?
I came across the following list of the “Top Ten Trending Spring Break Destinations.” The folks at Kayak have compiled the list after surveying the number of inquiries made over the past few months to various travel sites. I naturally assumed that most of the destinations would be “beach towns” in Florida, and I was…
Safety, Secrecy and Security
If college campuses are to be safe spaces, the goal needs to be to make them safe for everyone—even faculty. With tenure reduced and enfeebled and secret investigations commonplace, I have seen seasoned professors tremble with fear. They feel unsafe and unsupported by administrators and staff and have seen how processes meant to protect can…
America Re-Imagined, in Retrospect: Fifty Notable American Novels about the “West”: 39-40.
McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. One of the most prolific American novelists of the postwar period, Larry McMurtry has explored the history and culture of the West from the frontier era to the current period. He has skillfully spun sequels and prequels from his many of his novels. Thus,…
Are Colleges and Universities the New Version of the Family Farm?
In the post that I made yesterday to this blog, “Why Is the Future of the University Never a University?,” I included the following observation: “All realms of human endeavor can borrow profitably from other endeavors. The ways in which one industry has responded to an opportunity or an issue can often inspire parallel innovations…
Why Is the Future of the University Never a University?
In August 2014, Graeme Wood wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “The Future of College?” The tease under the headline is: “A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by stripping it down to its essence, eliminating lectures and tenure along with football games, ivy-covered buildings, and research libraries. What if he’s…
Pivoting is hard to do.
Usually, I save everything I write about subjects like tenure for the blog that you’re reading now. After all, I’m in the AAUP and even if you’re not (and you certainly should be), you’re probably sympathetic to most of the principles that the AAUP stands for otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog in the…
Moving Tenure
Writing under the pseudonym “Aurora Dagny,” a Canadian activist offers four pieces of advice for those working for any sort of cause: “Embrace humility…. Question yourself as fiercely as you question society.” “Treat people as individuals. For instance, don’t treat every person who belongs to an oppressed group as an authoritative mouthpiece of that group as…
Denial of Entry to Professor Troubling
The following is the text of a statement released earlier today by the American Association of University Professors on the denial of entry to the emirate of Abu Dhabi to NYU Professor Andrew Ross. Not long after the statement was issued, news arrived of another incident involving a faculty member in Abu Dhabi. According to…
The Presumption of the Technocrats
Writing for New Republic, Blaine Grateman has written a very perceptive review of Kevin Carey’s The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. Carey is a propagandist for the technocracy, that new class of the ultra-wealthy characterized by its unflinching willingness to promote digital technologies as an unmitigated blessing,…