It might have been drilled into your head from a young age that the only way to be successful in life is to get a college degree. You might have bought into the idea that college would be the best four years of your life. Replete with parties, filled with office hours with inspiring professors, … Continue reading “What Future Journalists Should Know About Journalism School”
I became interested in academic accountability within the university because I had no choice: the lack of accountability I experienced at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington obligated me to act. I had become embroiled in a situation where I was morally bound to report wrongdoing. But I had no idea that being a … Continue reading “Faculty Accountability Is Terrible—Even Students Have Better Standards”
One of higher education’s enduring questions is about the proper role of faculty. The debate is growing hotter, as increased activism by some faculty is causing pushback from many quarters. A week ago, the Martin Center published an article by Fabio Rojas in which he described the proper role of a faculty member as one … Continue reading “Defining Faculty Roles: Scholarship Only, Activism on Your Own Time”
The college campus is increasingly a focal point for shaping social norms, largely a result of rising college attendance; only five percent of the generation that came of age in the 1930s were college graduates, as opposed to roughly a third of millennials. Sometimes, however, this shaping is not always an improvement. In recent years, … Continue reading “The Dictatorship of the Offended”
The chickens have come home to roost at Duke’s Divinity School. Protesting students claim the school is insufficiently diverse. More needs to be done, they say, to combat racism, transphobia, homophobia, and associated evils. All this despite a campaign by the administration to achieve these very aims in the course of which a distinguished faculty … Continue reading “Duke Divinity School’s Race to the Bottom”
Let’s imagine that you felt a lump in your body and went to the doctor. Once you sat down in the examination room, the doctor came in and said, “Hello, it’s nice to see you. I am sorry, but I haven’t had time to examine your medical records. I’ve been busy. I went to protest … Continue reading “Defining Faculty Roles: Scholarship First, Activism Second”
A recent book by Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta, The Renaissance and the Postmodern: A Study in Comparative Critical Values represents something of a critical cat among the contemporary theoretical pigeons. Martin and Pesta, associate professors of English at Florida Atlantic University and the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, respectively, set out to judge the … Continue reading “Why Literary Scholarship Matters”
National surveys have consistently found that businesses have difficulty finding employees with the right skills. Even among college graduates searching for work, employers have found them lacking employable skills. Research that examines how college graduates transition into the workforce has intensified since the 1990s when researchers connected graduates’ career success with the quality of their … Continue reading “The Skills Gap: Employers Expect More Than What College Grads Offer”
Tenure used to provide faculty members with solid protection against all but criminal behavior. But now it is proving no match for weak excuses for firing professors who administrators want to be rid of. Marquette University’s termination of political science Professor John McAdams for speaking his mind about a younger faculty colleague’s handling of a … Continue reading “Bad Language Gets a Tenured Female Professor Fired for ‘Sexual Harassment’”
The title of this article alludes to Joan Didion’s famous essay about “love and death in the golden land,” a cautionary tale about the wreckage left behind when dreams collide with reality. Historically, California has always attracted dreamers and today one of the state’s biggest dreamers is Governor Jerry Brown, who once said, “A politician … Continue reading “A Dreamer of the Golden Dream: Jerry Brown’s Future for Higher Education”