Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jarrod Kelly chides the Right for pushing back on accreditation. While the headline is a bit aggressive (“The Right-Wing War on Accreditation”), authors generally don’t get to choose their headlines, and the piece itself is quite measured. While the ostensible focus of our disagreement is accreditation, I think […]
Read More
There have been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity with college administrators calling emergency meetings, professors changing their assignments, and educators writing essays (some perhaps written by AI?) that range in reaction from the nonchalant to the apocalyptic about the fate […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Let’s start with the obvious. The plague of junk citations in modern academic research will not be curbed by digital or bureaucratic means. For every clever new software tool […]
Read More
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the nation’s premiere professional organization for the sciences. As part of our expanding outreach into the sciences, we at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) decided to set up a booth at the annual March meeting of the AAAS, so that we could get out […]
Read More
On March 9, 2023, the Arkansas State Senate—controlled by a 29-to-6 Republican majority—narrowly passed a legislative ban on race-based affirmative action: Senate Bill 71 (SB 71). If signed into law, SB 71 would make the Natural State the tenth U.S. state to prohibit racial preferences in public programs. However, when the bill made its way […]
Read More
How social science has become social commentary It is well known that social science—psychology, sociology, and economics—has devolved into more than one hundred sub-specialties. Less well known is the result: criticism, which is essential to science, is increasingly restricted to bubbles of the like-minded. This has allowed critical criteria to diverge to the point that […]
Read More
James Moore’s recent epistle in this space, “The Rise of the Pseudo Faculty,” has jolted my aging brain to suggest an economist’s view on why college and university faculty have lost clout in their institutions over time. But first, a little history. If you asked a professor on an American campus 100 years ago, “Are […]
Read More
Paradoxes are excellent pedagogical exercises, and any professor worth his salt knows at least a few. To this storehouse of familiar examples, let me add a new paradox that is especially relevant to today’s academy: oikophobia, a term elucidated by Benedict Beckeld in his recently published Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. As […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Just when serious scholars started to worry about the pandemic of junk citations, others were positively promoting them. The “citation justice” movement I discussed in the last installment is […]
Read More
The purpose of ruthless objectivity and extreme expertise “Those who are looking ahead to a new movement in education, should think in terms of Education itself. Any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism’ becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms’ that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is a speech delivered by Professor Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University at a meeting of the California Association of Scholars on March 16, 2023. It has been edited prior to publication. Recent reports from Texas Tech University, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina show promising signs that […]
Read More
“So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter.” – Isaiah 59:14, NIV I am a sixty-six-year-old philosophy professor. If you are still reading, consider an approach to teaching and writing that I have practiced ever since I went to college and, especially, since […]
Read More
The last 30 years have seen a substantial change in the composition of college and university faculties, including a significant increase in the share of instruction delivered by non-tenure-track, contingent faculty, both full time and part time. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the U.S Government […]
Read More
The higher education accountability movement has seen very little progress over the years. The main success was the establishment of Cohort Default Rates, which revoked financial aid eligibility for colleges where too many students defaulted on their student loans. But this was both obscenely forgiving (a college could only lose eligibility if 30% or more […]
Read More
Why the heckler’s veto is wrong, and why universities must stop it Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree. Not content to merely […]
Read More
Western civilization depends on science, but science, especially social science, is now under threat. Until WWII, science was mostly a vocation. Scientists were motivated by curiosity and the search for verifiable truth. Since the growth of centralized, largely governmental funding, science has become not so much a vocation as a profession. Career incentives now increasingly […]
Read More
“Each side is coming face to face with its own conception of the devil!” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night Arthur Rackham’s 1935 illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” At some point while reading The Peloponnesian War (late fifth century BC) you begin to realize that Thucydides is up […]
Read More
Portland State University (PSU) closed its Confucius Institute (CI) in January 2021, citing “a range of financial, staffing and operational reasons.” Thus it shuttered its China-backed language program of 13 years. In its announcement of the closure, PSU noted that it intended to “expand direct academic ties” with China. PSU has made good on its […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. If you plan to present a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Spokane next year, please be advised: your submission needs to be chock full […]
Read More
The higher education reform movement, as pursued by Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature, has run into a heavy barrage of criticism from both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Keith Whittington, who, though writing in his individual capacity, is chairman of the governing committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). Normally, […]
Read More