The 2015 edition of the AAUP’s Policy Documents and Reports (widely known as the AAUP Redbook) is now available to be ordered. The Redbook presents in convenient format a wide range of AAUP policy statements. The current edition, the eleventh, includes basic statements on academic freedom, tenure, and due process; academic governance; professional ethics; research and teaching;…
One of the most influential books on my own vision of academia and American life is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Though I have serious reservations about parts of it, I return to the book again and again. Not surprisingly, I thought of it once more, today, when I read Patricia Williams’ article in The Guardian,…
A commenter called “blackcampbell” posted this response to my piece, “From Great Universities to ‘Knowledge Factories’: Another American Institution in Decline“: There are several aspects to the decline of academia that the author — not surprisngly, on his rush to look for a corporate strawman — misses. The “decline” is due to many forces 1)…
Early in the month, we reprinted a letter from University of Illinois department heads to incoming president Timothy Killeen about the Salaita case. It included this: The recent words and actions of senior officials in connection with the decision to revoke an offer of a tenured position in American Indian Studies to Dr. Steven Salaita have done…
The Far Right media has pre-emptively declared that the field of candidates who will vie for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is the strongest in history. Writing for the Far Right news outlet Newsmax, Todd Beamon and Bill Hoffmann have offered a survey of those candidates with the catchy title “16 for ’16: The Most…
It is usually more difficult to teach students how to frame an essay—how to write effective introductory and concluding paragraphs—than how to organize and develop the body of an essay. Likewise, models of effective framing paragraphs in academic writing are more difficult to locate than those in media writing simply because the details of some…
Martin Kich began the month with ruminations on “branding”: What my institution and others like it aspire to is to have name recognition equivalent to that of the most prestigious institutions in the country, or, failing that, approaching that of the institutions with the most successful athletic programs in the nation. It is a Sisyphean…
Jeffrey Beall has his new post out on predatory publishers. We all should look at it at least once a year.
Hank Reichman opened the month by reprinting a letter from Jewish scholars about which he wrote: Three weeks ago I posted to this blog a piece I titled “And Now There’s a Blacklist?” In that post I reported that an organization called the AMCHA Initiative, which claims it is “dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about,…
John K. Wilson began the month with an update on the Salaita situation: Considering that all of the trustees signed a letter embracing Salaita’s firing, it would be shocking if even a single trustee voted for Salaita. The Sept. 11 Board of Trustees meeting will obviously be the center of considerable attention, but it ultimately will…