BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER Once upon a time, the administration of a sleepy state university proposed a new budget, offering the rationale that the new budget would “incentivize” departments and promote “entrepreneurial” conduct—couching it in terms of “decentralized” operations and rewarding colleges for increases in their student full-time equivalent enrollments. Three years into the proposed experiment…
BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER AND BILL V. MULLEN As US colleges and universities were preparing to reopen their doors in August, we wrote in our fall 2020 Academe article, “The Necroliberal University,” that the reopening reflected a “necroliberal” consensus among university administrators that the benefits of a return to normalcy—and fiscal solvency—outweighed the risks of the…
BY AARON BARLOW Is Liberty University the future of the American university? Most of us have dismissed Liberty as an outlier. Though an accredited university, Liberty’s focus has always been education through religion rather than, as traditional American religious colleges and universities have it, religion through education. Its leaders have not the confidence in their…
BY DON ERON As someone who has long agitated for tenure-eligibility for all faculty members (after the successful completion of a probationary period), I have heard many counterarguments. Some of these—particularly coming from tenured faculty, who, as a cohort, tend toward opposition—are so obviously spurious, to say nothing of sanctimonious, that they dissipate of their…
BY SUSAN HEGEMAN We’ve had a tumultuous fall in Florida. It began in August, shortly after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, when Richard Spencer, one of the speakers in Charlottesville, applied for a speaking venue at the University of Florida. UF initially denied his request, citing safety concerns, especially after it…
Henry Giroux, in his new Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, credits the phrase of the title here to sixties radicals. I don’t remember it myself, but it certainly fits the time. College students were feeling empowered even as they were under attack; colleges and universities were places for change, for innovation, and the students felt…