The Heart of the Matter

In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Major Scobie steps outside of a house filled with the ill and dying: The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night also gave an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew,…

Join the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education

The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education – CFHE for short – is a  GRASSROOTS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to support quality higher education. It was initiated in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 2011, by leaders of faculty organizations from 21 states. CFHE’s fifth meeting was held in Columbus, Ohio, on May 17 and 18, 2013.…

Postscript to My Recent Post on Rep. Louie Gohmert

This is a postscript to my post “And Here I Thought That Louie Gohmert Was the Most Ridiculous Congressman from Texas” [https://academeblog.org/2013/06/20/and-here-i-thought-that-louie-gohmert-was-the-most-ridiculous-congressman-from-texas/]. One of the few bills to receive overwhelming bipartisan support over the past three years has been one that eliminated the use of the word “lunatic” in all federal legislation. Paralleling the 2010…

What Has Happened to the AAUP?

by Peter Wood This post was originally published on June 17 at Minding the Campus. Author Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. We asked for (and received) permission to re-post the article here, in light of a guest post by Allan Lichtman of American University that is a response to Wood.…

Navigating the Rough, Uncharted Waters Ahead

Periodically, it’s always prudent to take a step backward to reflect on the state of American higher education in the first years of the 21st-century. It looks very different today from the higher education system that we inherited from the leadership guiding higher education policy after the Vietnam War. The currents affecting American colleges and…

Arizona’s Voter-Registration Law Is Declared Unconstitutional, Bringing into Focus Some Less Widely Recognized Aspects of Voter Suppression Efforts

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Arizona’s voter most recently enacted voter registration law to be unconstitutional. The law required that those registering to vote provide copies of several documents proving their citizenship, pointedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 which sought to encourage voting by providing a simple, federally processed form…

“Race, Class and Gender”

For the past six months, I’ve been hearing odd complaints that the humanities, once home, supposedly, to the study of “truth, beauty and goodness,” have been overwhelmed by concern for “race, class and gender.” Another came last Friday, using the exact phrases of the older ones, all stemming from a single “study” put forward by…