My colleague, California State University, East Bay English Professor Susan Gubernat, has published a terrific piece in the Sacramento Bee that should go viral. Read it here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article4126796.html
This is a guest post from Karen Craigo, a non-tenure-track professor at Drury University. Just the other day, professor Craigo found out that her three-year contract was not renewed. She wrote a poem in response to her situation. To get the sack is to lose your job. We might also say canned, fired, given the boot.…
The Community College Research Center at the Columbia University Teachers College has released a report on “Unintended Impacts of Performance Funding on Community Colleges and Universities in Three States.” The full text of this CCRC Working Paper No. 78 is available at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/unintended-impacts-performance-funding.pdf. The report’s authors are Hana Lahr, Lara Pheatt, Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya…
In an exasperating article on the op-ed page of The New York Times today, science writer Benedict Carey argues for the benefit of testing, conflating all types from yearly standardized tests to weekly quizzes and ignoring the indisputable fact that tests are primarily regressive (they test what is known, sometimes at the expense of what might…
Huffaker, Clair. Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian. New York: McKay, 1967. When Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian was published in 1967, Huffaker had already established himself as a novelist and screenwriter who could remain fundamentally true to the Western formula while cleverly manipulating some of its elements to give each story a winning combination…
The following is a news release from We Are Ohio, the progressive coalition originally established to oppose Senate Bill 5. This coalition has remained in place because the attacks on collective bargaining rights, public employees, and public education have shown no signs of abating. The Know Your Charter site is a remarkable resource because it…
In order to promote critical reflection and public discussions on the impact of neoliberalism on higher education the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University is hosting a national conference on “Neoliberalism and Public Higher Education” at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in East Lansing, Michigan, on March 27 – 28, 2015. Critical topics…
Three weeks ago, Ebola was an all-consuming crisis that obsessed politicians and the media. But now, it’s just an old issue and old news. People are still dying in droves in substandard medical facilities in West Africa, and nothing much has changed in terms of our efforts to insure that the disease is contained when…
‘Academic freedom is in the eye of the beholder.’ That, I think, will be the most common takeaway by readers of Stanley Fish’s new book Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). After all, he breaks the concept into five “schools”: The “It’s just a job” school (his own…
At this past June’s annual meeting, a chapter leader suggested that AAUP ought to start tracking votes of no confidence—even if not as formally as it tracks its own investigations and censures of institutions for violations of the AAUP’s core principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure/economic security. As it is now, a vote…