A new report out today from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (of which the AAUP is a member) focuses on problems faced by contingent faculty–and, by extension, their students–at the start of term. The report, based on a survey by the New Faculty Majority of 500 adjuncts, find that many have “at…
The following is a guest post by Donald Rogers. Rogers is the chair of the Organization of American Historians Committee on Part-Time, Adjunct and Contingent Faculty, and serves as the OAH liaison to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. He is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University. Recently, the…
This post is a re-presentation/slightly edited version of this post from my own blog where I have lately been discussing my participation in a Coursera MOOC “World Music.” Throw a brick out a window nowadays and you are liable to hit an article about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); conveniently, The Chronicle of Higher Education has…
This piece, by Debra Leigh Scott, originally appeared on the blog The Homeless Adjunct. It is reposted here with her permission: A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and…
Last week, Mitt Romney directed that Obama “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” For good and bad, ‘division and anger’ have always been part of American politics. Take the case of Alexander Hamilton. He was called “Tom S**t” in one New York paper, was accused of having African ancestry…
Four recent incidents have made me aware again of one of those itches it seems impossible to scratch, the valuation of “content” as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Scholarship, today, becomes simply the thing for sale. The first of these was the resignation of Jonah Lehrer from The New Yorker. The second…
In the August 17 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is an article by Beth Mole, “The Future of Peer Review in the Humanities is Wide Open.” She focuses on Peter Sigal, a Duke University historian and one of the editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. His journal is experimenting with an “optional open-review process”: Authors who choose…
I’m a historian, blogger and longtime AAUP member who’s delighted to have the opportunity to post here from time to time on the kinds of issues that concern Academe readers. While I started off blogging about history, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time at my home blog in the last year or so writing…
Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson has pulled David Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies from distribution. According to NPR: “When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out,” said Thomas Nelson Senior Vice President and Publisher Brian Hampton. “Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences…
Could education (higher education in particular) be about to follow the path journalism found itself on, starting just under a decade ago? Could digital possibilities be on the verge of ushering in a new paradigm reflective of what happened to the newspaper business as a result of the rise of the blogosphere? I doubt it.…