(This article appeared in the latest issue of the Illinois AAUP’s newspaper, Illinois Academe.) By Keith R. Johnson, Oakton Community College The Great Recession impacted everyone, but it contributed to a real hit for public college and university adjunct faculty. Pressures on budgets over decades have slowly increased higher education’s dependence on adjunct faculty. Now…
This is a guest post by Richard McCarty, an assistant professor of religious studies at Mercyhurst University. His article, “Objects of the Inquisition,” appears in the January-February 2014 issue of Academe. The first incarnation of “Objects of the Inquisition” was a paper for the 2012 annual AAUP conference in Washington DC. I am grateful that it eventually…
The January-February issue of Academe marks a major milestone for the AAUP: It’s issue 1 of Volume 100. As we begin the celebration of the AAUP’s centennial, Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen look to one of the AAUP’s founders, John Dewey, for a model of academic as public intellectual. There have been other…
In an article slugged “Tools for Teachers” on its website, the American Federation of Teachers presents what it says are “10 Myths About the Common Core State Standards.” I had a hard time getting beyond its rebuttal to the first “myth”: 1. “The standards tell us what to teach.” FACT: The Common Core State Standards define…
“‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard.’ I believe it was Shia LaBeouf who said that,” quipped Jim Carrey at the Golden Globes the other day. Someone always said it before. Maybe not exactly the same, but they said it. Question is, when is it influence, when imitation, and when outright plagiarism? In the Introduction to…
We all know how the totalitarian government of China censors websites by blocking access to their IP addresses. But it’s shocking to learn that the administration of Yale University is now utilizing this same tactic to ban access to a website they dislike.
The following post was written by Harry Hellenbrand, Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at California State University, Northridge. It is posted here with his permission. Boycotts and Academic Freedom By Harry Hellenbrand What role, if any, should universities play in political disputes? When the American Studies Association passed a resolution urging American universities to…
The AAUP has long been sounding the alarm about the problematic rise of contingent faculty appointments, which generally come with no job security, few if any benefits, and a fraction of the salary that a tenured or tenure-track faculty member can expect. In the January-February issue of Academe, Chris Nagel looks at the question from…
In his introduction to the 2000 edition of his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Russell Jacoby wrote: Intellectuals have not disappeared, but something has altered in their composition. They have become more professional and insular; at the same time they have lost command of the vernacular, which thinkers…
How is a courtroom like a classroom? The two may not seem related – but as Patricia Evridge Hill writes in the new issue of Academe, they are more alike than you might think. While serving as the foreperson of a jury recently, Hill realized that the eleven other members of her group had a…