This is a guest post from Karen Davis, a lecturer in cinematic arts at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a statewide academic senator. On January 23, the Academic Senate of the California State University unanimously passed AS-3199/FA: Non Tenure Track Faculty and Shared Governance in the California State University: A Call to Campus Senates.…
If the residential learning experience continues to define a wide range of traditional higher education settings, then college leadership – including faculty – must become far more intentional about it. At the moment, there are two principal levels of influence dominating the residential part of the learning experience. The first is the presumed social contract…
I received this message yesterday from StudentDebtCrisis.org, an organization that deserves our support:
Recently, news about a set of demands by activist students at Clemson University concerned about racism and intolerance spread like wildfire across the internet when a group of 110 faculty and staff published a letter in the student newspaper endorsing those demands. These students and faculty were accused by various conservative websites of wanting to…
After my mother died, in cleaning out her house I went through my father’s old books, pulling out the ones that I might find of use in my own writing and teaching. Among those was a dusty paperback of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I returned to it recently, remembering it from…
By Bill V. Mullen Arizona State Ethnic Studies Professor Lee Bebout is under attack by a white supremacist group called the “National Youth Front” for teaching a course at his University called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Lee was my student at Purdue University, where he earned his Ph.D in American Studies.…
Bombogenesis: a scientific term that the Weather Channel has popularized because it combines suggestions of the destructive power of heavy ordinance and associations with the Biblical story of the origins of life—that is, it suggests re-creation out of the maelstrom. Here is the explanation from the Weather Channel’s website: “Bombogenesis. The word sounds ominous, but…
The following infographic was produced by designer Eleanor Lutz and journalist Linda Kennedy for the Gates Foundation. It has been publicized under the lead “If There Were Only 100 College Students in America,” but it basically presents percentages rounded to the closest integer. The sources of the statistics in each category are indicated on the…
Recently considerable attention has been paid on this blog and elsewhere to potential threats to academic freedom posed by the undue influence of outside donors on scholarship. One thinks immediately, of course, of efforts by the Koch brothers at Florida State and elsewhere to fund academic positions that reflect their personal ideology and of the…
In response to Steven Salaita’s lawsuit yesterday, the University of Illinois administration issued a statement (copied in full below). Many claims in the U of I statement are incorrect, and others seem to confess to precisely the punishment of political speech that Salaita’s lawsuit is based upon. The U of I statement claims that Salaita’s tweets…