After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the […]
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Many people, some conservatives included, say we need to get ideology out of the college classroom. Some professors say proudly, “my students never come to know where I stand.” I practice an opposite approach. I tell students that I am a free-market economist, a classical liberal or libertarian. And I am not suggesting that […]
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What do we do about the adjunct problem? Everybody knows it exists, and everybody agrees on its elements. Well-qualified, talented, and conscientious people teach multiple courses, sometimes on different campuses, at a few thousand dollars per course. Add up class prep and grading hours and their labor sometimes falls below minimum wage, and they don’t […]
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Howard Zinn, the late self-described “socialist anarchist” history professor and mentor to the New Left, would have been proud of the way the Wisconsin protests rolled along. The weeks-long sit-in of the Wisconsin state capitol building–heavily populated by teachers and students–exemplified the kind of “participatory democracy” his associate Tom Hayden promoted in the Port Huron […]
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Not surprisingly, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been deeply affected by the important labor dispute that has consumed the state, its capitol, and the nation the last two weeks. Passions are high, especially over the part of Governor Scott Walker’s budget proposal that will drastically limit collective bargaining by state employees covered by […]
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A few months back, as readers of Minding the Campus likely took note, Education professor Bill Ayers popped up in the news once again. He had retired from his post at University of Illinois-Chicago, and the next step was to assume “emeritus” status. The title is granted by the trustees and usually follows without question. […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has just added a new nail to the coffin of American Academia. Lax admission policies, politically correct texts, underpaid assistants who do the teaching in place of the big name professors busy on their next books, incompetent management, to name just a few liabilities, are wrecking the once-proud reputation of […]
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William Ayers is back in the news—after the University of Illinois-Chicago Board of Trustees denied his designation as professor emeritus. The issue arose after Christopher Kennedy—the late senator’s son and the chairman of the UIC trustees—noted that Ayers had dedicated a 1974 to (among others) the assassin Sirhan Sirhan, who Ayers also described as a […]
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Dear Assistant Professor: Congratulations on your new job! Whether you’re a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years—I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position […]
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The recent flurry of debate about tenure’s value has featured a revival of sorts for Harvard Education School professor Cathy Trower. The New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” section included a contribution from Trower, in which she proposed a “constitutional convention” selected through a kind of quota system—“selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably […]
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Recently my colleague Mark Bauerlein commented on the interesting debate regarding the continued merits—or lack thereof—for tenure. The basic critique of tenure is a powerful one: as Freakonomics put it, “What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on […]
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Here is what Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It , says about tenure in a recent interview in Atlantic Monthly: Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their […]
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The New York Times Room for Debate page hosted a forum last week entitled “What If College Tenure Dies?” As the preamble rightly notes, the question follows from an increasing shift in university personnel away tenure and tenure-track lines and toward adjuncts and lecturers hired on temporary contracts. The numbers are stark: In 1975, 57 […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story this week by Robin Wilson entitled “Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education”. It announces a study by the U.S. Dept of Education due out in the fall covering employment in higher education. Its findings regarding tenure are dire: Over just three […]
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In 1977 the great mathematician and teacher Morris Kline published an indictment of academe in a book aptly called Why the Professor Can’t Teach. Kline not only blamed “the overemphasis on research” as the “prime culprit” for the poor quality of undergraduate education, he also blamed professors—especially tenured professors—for ignoring their “moral obligations to students” […]
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Inside Higher Ed took a look at the controversy over the “Crying Wolf” project, in which a committee consisting mostly of academics will pay for works of “scholarly integrity” dealing with contemporary public policy issues. Scholarly “integrity,” in this case, means reaching the conclusion before assembling the evidence. Defenses of the Wolfers, alas, confirm critiques […]
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After decades of trying, the Democrat-controlled Wisconsin legislature, with the encouragement of the union-backed governor, passed a statute allowing unionization of faculty in the University of Wisconsin system. Recently the first campus, Superior, voted to unionize their faculty by a 75-5 vote. I believe that ultimately faculty unions will seriously damage public universities in Wisconsin […]
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With various co-authors, University of British Columbia Sociologist Neil Gross has made a cottage industry of downplaying charges that academia is politically correct. Seemingly, the left’s domination of social science and humanities departments is of no more concern than the fact, cited by Thomas Sowell, that in the 1990s, Cambodians ran 90 percent of California’s […]
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In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write incisive op-ed columns galore, dominate talk radio, publish in widely admired magazines like City Journal but the half-life […]
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Should the American Anthropological Association “denounce the current human rights violations in Honduras” and “support Hondurans that… continue to resist the June 28, 2009 military coup in their country”? This question, put to a vote of AAA members, passed by a margin of 656-166 in online voting that ended last Friday. Taking a stand on […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments? The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. “Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” says AAAS’s Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don’t yield the right […]
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Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex. At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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I want to say how pleased I am to join Minding the Campus as a regular blogger. My first in-depth exposure to the power of the blogosphere came during my tenure battle, when I received timely and extremely effective support from bloggers Erin O’Connor and Jerry Sternstein. I quickly discovered that in commenting on technical […]
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Here’s a fun job: adjunct professor, as described by University of Akron adjunct Maria C. Maisto writing in a Sept. 10 manifesto in Inside Higher Education: I teach English composition — one of the most labor-intensive teaching assignments out there. This semester I’ll have to respond to 85 students on two different campuses and almost […]
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Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university’s apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies. The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the […]
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AAUP president Cary Nelson recently e-mailed his membership about an important new venture for the academic union. Proclaiming “this is not your grandparents’ AAUP,” Nelson celebrated the work of the “Department of Organizing and Services,” which had discovered “a faculty band from Ohio performing original songs about the ironies of current academic life.” Perhaps Nelson […]
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Last November the University of Texas at Austin issued an alarmed Gender Equity Task Force report indicating that, as the university stated in a press release, “on average, a lower percentage of tenured and tenure track faculty are women than at other schools.” In fact, the percentage of women at UT-Austin wasn’t that much lower […]
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By Maurice Black & Erin O’Connor Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg’s Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009. According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites […]
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