BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The sobering social and economic costs of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. The challenge for teachers to keep working via Zoom are not so much physical now, as they are mental and emotional, especially for those of us used to teaching face-to-face in classrooms. Being in Zoom rooms too often…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In an extraordinary attack on academic freedom, three fellows from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution–Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson–are demanding censorship of faculty and the student newspaper in order to silence criticism of themselves. They write in an article at the Stanford Review (a conservative student publication), “as individuals we…
BY DEBORAH CAFIERO During the COVID-19 crisis, the pace of cuts to foreign language departments and programs, already brisk before the pandemic, has accelerated. The devaluation of language study is necessary, so the argument goes, to reduce costs and trim programs that elicit minimal student interest. Besides, English is becoming the lingua franca of the…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ AND MICHAEL DECESARE In September, the AAUP announced an investigation of the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the pandemic. The investigation’s initial focus was on seven institutions; the following month, an eighth was added to the list. Never before in the Association’s 106-year history has a governance…
BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical…
BY JOHN K. WILSON We are all living in the political and media worlds that Rush Limbaugh created. Limbaugh, who died this morning, transformed America in enormous ways, most of them negative. I harshly criticized Limbaugh in my book about him, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh’s Assault on Reason, which was published…
BY BILL BERGMAN The differences between first-year college students and seniors were more pronounced than ever during the fall semester. I had a firsthand glimpse while teaching both a first-year seminar and upper-level marketing classes on campus. While I could never really see the mask-covered faces of first-year students in my classes, their eyes sparkled…
BY JOHN K. WILSON In December, the Northwestern University AAUP chapter released a “Report of the Committee on Northwestern University’s COVID-19 Response,” which was endorsed by the chapter members and more than 100 faculty. Tomorrow, the authors of the report will discuss it in an online session on Tues. Feb. 16 at 5-6pm Central time…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, I’ll be speaking on a PEN America panel about “Academic Freedom and Classroom Conduct” along with Jonathan Friedman, Neijma Celestine-Donnor, and Amna Khalid. So I wanted to offer a few thoughts about what academic freedom means in the classroom. Along with freedom of research and extramural utterances, freedom of teaching…
BY JULIE SCHMID It’s time for a reckoning. So said Representative Ayanna Pressley at the campaign launch of the New Deal for Higher Education on Wednesday. In a rousing kickoff, Pressley, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and other panelists talked about dreams achieved through higher education, but also the darker side of dreams deferred and a system…