BY THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES On Friday, March 5, 2021, Iowa lawmakers vote on legislation that would end tenure for faculty at Iowa’s three public universities. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) issued the following letter to leaders of the Iowa House of Representatives and State Senate, as well as Governor Kim…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In 2016, right after the Presidential election, I wrote on this blog: Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE The AAUP released today a new research report, Policies on Academic Freedom, Dismissal for Cause, Financial Exigency, and Program Discontinuance, that examines the prevalence of AAUP-supported policies in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements at four-year institutions that have a tenure system. The analysis replicates a study conducted in 2000 and tracks changes that…
BY JOHN MCNAY One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get our college and university administrators to put education first and not allow the resources of the institutions to get hijacked for other purposes. The inability to focus on the real problems is widespread and yet the…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK Spring 2020 | Vol. 106, No. 2 The spring 2020 issue of Academe, inspired by the AAUP’s statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, examines the complexities—conceptual, critical, structural, and political—of the production of knowledge. Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE The higher education news from China late last year was chilling to all who value academic freedom. Three major universities—Fudan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi Normal—under the direction of the government’s Ministry of Education, deleted “freedom of thought” from their charters and added pledges to follow Communist Party leadership, according to reports from Reuters.…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The new September–October issue of Academe focuses on a profession that increasingly finds itself “in the crosshairs.” Articles address recent and historical instances of targeted harassment of faculty, the obligations of tenure-track faculty toward colleagues on contingent appointments, and the suppression of a course scrutinizing collegiate athletics. Follow the links in…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE On Thursday, I posted Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s rejoinder to Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of their book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Academe, May-June 2016, 47-50). Below is Maisto’s and Kahn’s response to Bérubé’s and Ruth’s rejoinder. Please continue this important conversation in the Comments section at the bottom of the page.…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE The May-June issue of Academe included Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s 2015 book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments. What follows is a rejoinder from Bérubé and Ruth. A response from Maisto and Kahn will be published on this blog shortly. We are…
This is now the third time I’ve written about being harassed for being an educator, but clearly the message isn’t getting through, so I will try one more time to reason with those who spend their lives making it their duty to share their opinions regarding my profession, my areas of expertise, and the work…