Phan Nguyen on Outside Donor Influence on Salaita Firing, Suspension, and Dismissal

The issue of possible donor influence in the Steven Salaita contract-revocation case is significant because on-campus personnel decisions should not be influenced by external actors. Academic freedom and shared governance are severely attenuated if universities and colleges outsource, and are unduly influenced by off-campus forces intruding into personnel and hiring processes on campus. Remember Alan Dershowitz and the…

Higher Education: The Problem with Priorities

It’s been interesting to watch over the years how priorities emerge on college and university campuses. Some develop organically, whether in service of an academic program, to meet a perceived need, or at their best, to fulfill an institution’s strategic plan. They are part of the business of evolution, matching and balancing people, programs and…

The 2015 AAUP Redbook

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;…

In Decline or Under Attack?: American Higher Education Today

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)…

2014 Through the Academe Blog: December

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…

Forecasting the Race for the GOP Nomination in 2016

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…

Why We Keep Reading—and Why We Don’t

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…

2014 Through the Academe Blog: November

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…