An ill wind has buffeted higher education in the year of the plague. Workers have been laid off, the ranks of the professoriate have shrunk, and enrollment declines across the industry threaten the long-term finances of all but the most prestigious institutions. While the pain has not been as deep as some experts feared, a … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Higher Ed Bureaucracy Won the Pandemic”
Members of the media and faculty erupted into histrionics at the recent appointment of Darrell Allison to the chancellorship of Fayetteville State University. It is a great scandal, they claimed; Allison “cut in line” cried the left-wing think tank NC Policy Watch; the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and FSU faculty senate questioned not … Continue reading “Perpetual Scandal-Mongering as a Political Tool”
In March 2018, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees adopted new rules that fatally undermine academic freedom. We authored this piece for the Martin Center explaining the damage the amendments would inflict on higher education in the state. Unfortunately, the Board of Trustees ignored our warning, a warning reiterated by numerous other faculty and … Continue reading “Professors Fight to Save Free Speech on Campus and Academic Freedom in Arkansas”
“Class discussions trend towards group-therapy sessions,” wrote Toni Airaksinen in 2016 for Quillette. At the time, she was studying at Barnard College and described moving from an initial infatuation with gender studies to seeing it as an “absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda.” This lack of … Continue reading “Gender Studies’ Value Is Under Question—And for Good Reason”
If you want to see one example of why a new populism has emerged in American universities in the last 10 years, take a look at a statement issued last week by the Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The incapacity of the experts and professionals who wrote the … Continue reading “Faculty in Denial about Own Role in Decline of Humanities”
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part series on faculty roles in higher education. Part I by Fabio Rojas is here and Part II by Jay Schalin is here. Should we allow scholars to be activists? Fabio Rojas (“Scholarship First, Activism Second”) and Jay Schalin (“Scholarship Only, Activism on Your Own Time”) have offered various … Continue reading “Defining Faculty Roles: In Defense of the Activist-Scholar”
In 2010, a seemingly insignificant event in a far-off land caught my eye. The Israeli academic world was having a fracas over the actions of “post-Zionist” faculty that raised important questions about the principle of academic freedom. Briefly, Zionism is support for a religious Jewish state; post–Zionism refers to the desire for Zionist Israel to … Continue reading “Academic Freedom in an Age of Political Correctness”
Parents of Marquette students can now rest assured that their children in college will be “safe” from homophobic and other politically incorrect indoctrination; professors of philosophy will no longer consider it their “mission” (pace Socrates) to subject widely accepted meanings and values to intensive reexamination; and professors of other subjects who manage their own private blogs now know that what they formerly considered to be “free speech,” even in their extracurricular activities, has now been redefined by their employers.