BY IRENE MULVEY Happy busiest time of the semester, colleagues. And for those of you raising children, or who have elderly family members to be concerned about, I don’t know how you do it all at this time of year. I have no idea how I did it myself when my own children were young.…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY An article in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed covered a significant initiative that is picking up steam on campuses across the country. In response to laws passed or proposed by Republican-dominated state legislatures and boards of trustees that ban the teaching of “divisive” materials on race, racism, and gender at state…
BY MARK JAMES A year ago, I was called in to meet with my dean after a parent complained to the president’s office that I had been discussing white supremacy in my American and African American literature classes. I wrote about that experience last summer in Inside Higher Ed, and I hoped that would be…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
BY MARIAH QUINN The AAUP has launched a podcast called AAUP Presents, which takes a look at issues such as shared governance, academic freedom, and institutional debt. The first three episodes are available now. The series kicks off with an interview with AAUP president Irene Mulvey, who takes us through some of AAUP’s work this…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT AND CHRISTIAN P. VAUPEL Conflicts between academics and administrators on college campuses have been in the news. Recently, issues of mask mandates, actions taken to reduce expenses due to pandemic-related loss of revenue, and concerns about alleged violations of academic freedom have erupted. What reports about such problems don’t always acknowledge…
BY NICOLE BRAUN It looks like I will have quite a few dogs and cats to care for over the holidays as a lot of folks are going away. I am going to meet some more new furry pals today. But this happened the other day: I went to a potential gig where the couple…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Michael Hobbes, a journalist based in Berlin, has a substack site, “Confirm My Choices,” where he regularly posts commentary on a variety of topics. Today he posted a piece, “Lies, Damn Lies and ‘Self-Censorship’ Statistics,” that really hit the nail on the head about the much-ballyhooed “Campus Free Speech Crisis.” I’m…
BY THOMAS A. BRESLIN Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies have used conflict-of-interest policies meant to keep China from poaching American intellectual property to muzzle Florida’s public college and university professors. So doing, they’ve managed to deny the public access to the expertise of public university and college faculty members, threatened public health, put…
BY LOUIS HOWARD PORTER Why are we diversifying a profession that exploits a majority of its professionals? What are the consequences of diversifying a profession where many are either forced to leave it, or take jobs as contingent labor making poverty-level wages? Is the consequence of such diversification really “social justice”? Or is it exploitation…