Once upon in the ’80s, a time of undergraduate education I experienced as a student and can vouch for, dorm rooms at colleges looked surprisingly dingy. This was the case also at very expensive liberal arts schools, one of which I attended. I remember being slightly taken aback upon seeing my dorm room for the…
My students come to college with only the most muddled idea of how things were in the past. They see historical change in terms of style and let it go at that. At least part of the blame for this, believe it or not, lies with standardized testing and with the lists it is based…
Aarons, Edward Sidney. Assignment to Disaster. New York: Fawcett, 1955. This novel is the first of more than forty featuring San Durrell, a C.I.A. operative whose assignments take him to all corners of the world. The most conspicuous gimmick of the series is that every title begins with the word “Assignment.” Aarons was so prolific…
Some books just lend themselves to the classroom. They’ve sufficient complexity, wit, style, and gravitas to carry students in the myriad directions students like to wander as they learn. Though they can be broken down, they can’t be broken, “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” killed through close reading. No matter what you do to them,…
University of Oregon President Michael Gottfredson has signed a new policy protecting academic freedom, which is being called one of the best policies in the country for defending academic freedom. The passage of this policy also refutes the false notion that academic unions undermine policy-making by a faculty senate. In this case, the AAUP/AFT union president chaired…
I live in the deep South, in the Bible Belt, and to situate myself further, I would say I live on its belt buckle. When my wife and I moved here 22 years ago from Texas, a state which many think is already subject to the loud thump of the bible which rivals only that…
By Bill Ayers (reposted from billayers.org) The call for “trigger warnings”—a recent censorious trend gaining traction on American college campuses—is designed to alert students of any potentially troubling, unsettling, or upsetting course materials. The impetus is benign enough, and the context includes the important recent mobilization to deal seriously with epidemic levels of rape and…
The American conception of academic freedom arose with the Progressive Era in the 1890s primarily because of social scientists who advocated for reforms that negatively affected financial interests. The press – muckrakers and establishment papers – actively participated in the debate over academic freedom that took place during that time. The attention of the press sometimes helped professors…
Clara Wajngurt lists numerous ways that bullying can manifest itself on campus, from coworkers to students, and the possible effects, both psychological and physical. In her article for the May-June 2014 issue of Academe, she discusses not only the causes and symptoms of bullying, and ideas for how to end or prevent it. As her…
Actually, it turns out that the list depends at least somewhat on the audience whom Scott Jaschik is addressing. In an interview with E-Campus News [http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/ten-higher-ed-stories-020/], he listed the following ten stories: 1. College incompetence handling sexual assaults 2. Links between college sexual assaults and other issues 3. Sexual assaults and student athletes 4. Anonymous…