Ever since the attacks on public sector unions, working families, and public education in Wisconsin that began just over two years ago, my own writing has changed. It’s become less…well, “academic.” I find myself more interested in plowing through company SEC filings on Lexis-Nexis than some of the newest scholarship in my field. Don’t get…
This week, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released a draft statement, entitled “Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance”, which in part originated with the following presentation that I have given at several state conference meetings over the past year. A couple of years ago, I served as chair of a committee…
Members of the English Department at Queensborough Community College asked me to share this open letter with the wider AAUP and faculty communities. A letter from one individual member of the department can be found here: Dear President Call, This is an open letter written on behalf of the 22 fulltime English Professors who voted…
In an open letter published this afternoon, Associate Professor of English at the CUNY campus Queensborough Community College Susan Jacobowitz describes better than I can the QCC situation that has been unfolding since September. The latest complication was a vote, just before Hurricane Sandy, by the members of the English Department to remove their Chair…
The blog Retraction Watch, on its FAQ page, states: We wholeheartedly agree it’s important to check out tips — anonymous or not — about potentially dodgy papers. But doing that right would require a much larger team, so we’ve decided that publicizing retractions that do happen — and finding out why papers were retracted, not…
If you don’t start building a new organizational program from the ground up but impose it from the top down, you are going to lose control when the program has to be implemented by people with no real commitment to it, no feeling of ownership of it. We’re seeing that right now with implementation of…