Marc Bousquet writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education of “The Moral Panic in Literary Studies” today. He believes that it stems from “loyalty to a pedagogy from the 1950s.” I think he’s right—and I’ve little sympathy for the handwringers. Though I do think that the shift in English Departments toward Rhetoric and Composition and Digital Humanities…
With Academe magazine now in its hundredth volume, it seems an appropriate time to look back on the history of the AAUP’s periodicals. The AAUP was founded in January 1915 and published the first Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, which included what is now called the Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom…
Pointed out in InsideHigherEd, and The Fiscal Times among several reports, a recent study from the Association for American College and Universities (AACU) stated that “liberal arts majors enjoy comparable long-term career prospects as students who obtain degrees in more “useful” fields. Students who study the liberal arts do about as well as most college…
In August 2013, the National Journal published an article by Amy Harder that begins: “North Dakota is like an overachieving child who attracts the attention of everyone—except Dad. “The oil boom taking over western North Dakota and transforming America’s energy landscape has prompted visits from people around the world—Germany, Turkey, Japan, Dubai, and elsewhere—to…
In a recent post, I discussed a dubious proposal put forward in Ohio to award associates degrees to all university students who have simply completed a specified number of credit hours, regardless of the distribution of those credit hours [https://academeblog.org/2014/04/04/kent-state-university-announces-plans-to-increase-dramatically-the-number-of-associates-degrees-that-it-grants/]. A much more reasonable program has been initiated in Missouri, though to date the results…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ The increasing awareness of—and outrage about–the size of the debt crushing college graduates is, we must hope, a sign that meaningful action to address it may be possible. The numbers alone are staggering. According to recent reports, the average…
This week the Roberts Court doubled down on its arguments that political contributions are simply a form of free expression and they neither distort the electoral process nor exert a corrupting influence on our elected officials. This week Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal filed a lawsuit against the progressive group MoveOn.org because it has paid for…
The Columbus Dispatch recently reported that Kent State University is planning to grant an associates degree to any student who completes 60 credit hours, or about half of the credit hours needed for most baccalaureate degrees. Apparently the university will create a generic associates degree for this purpose. In addition to its main campus in…
Houston’s KHOU reports that at Lonestar College students enrolled in an introduction to chemistry section were taught instead an advanced chemistry course. Apparently the mix-up was not discovered until almost the end of the semester, at which point almost every student in the course had a failing grade. The news report featured an student who…
Several reports of the AAUP’s founding mention that it took place in the Chemists’ Club in New York. While there is a website by the current Chemists’ Club, it moved its location and sold the building in which the founding took place. I was able to locate information about the original location of the Chemists’ Club, which is…