We'll be holding our first general meeting of the academic year on Friday, September 23, at 3:30 in the Faculty Lounge. Our guest will be Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the AAUP. We'll be talking about the role of local AAUP advocacy chapters, as well as current state issues.
Refreshments (of the adult variety) will be served!! JCU faculty are welcome to attend.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Academe: Focus on the Humanities in Trouble
Academe: Magazine of the AAUP
The road to dystopia is paved with both small cuts and big budget holes. Some of the cuts seem tiny, almost invisible; some of the budget holes so big, you could drive whole programs into them.
The September–October issue is the second of a triptych of Academe issues devoted to universities in trouble. Our July–August issueaddressed organizing in hard times. This issueis devoted to the humanities. In November–December, guest editor Christopher Newfield will take on the escalating troubles at public universities.
Note that I’m not using the word “crisis.” Nonetheless, as historian Ellen Schrecker notes in her trenchant review essay, “The Humanities on Life Support,” the future of the humanities “looks grim indeed.”
And it’s not just in the United States. English art historian, novelist, and journalist Iain Pears writes, in “A Price above Rubrics,” that the humanities and arts are particularly vulnerable in Britain, where universities made a “Mephistophelian bargain” about their abilities to create and deliver quick economic solutions and are now paying a terrible price.
Friday, September 9, 2011
News: A Dissenter Is Fired - Inside Higher Ed
September 8, 2011
On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors wrote to Erskine College, expressing worry about the treatment of William Crenshaw, an English professor who has been among the most outspoken critics of the role of religious conservatives in shaping the direction of the institution. While the AAUP didn't weigh in on the disputes over Erskine, it said that Crenshaw never should have been suspended and barred from teaching -- as he recently had been -- unless he met the college handbook's requirement of causing "immediate harm" by his presence.
News: A Dissenter Is Fired - Inside Higher Ed:
Friday, September 2, 2011
News: 'Under New Management' - Inside Higher Ed
"While higher education is often spoken of in terms of crisis, this concept might be better treated as a critical juncture or turning point rather than a terminus," writes Randy Martin. This sentiment appears in the preface to Martin's new book, Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn (Temple University Press), and it serves as an accurate summary of his stance on many of the issues the book explores.
Under New Management covers matters that prompt much debate in higher education: the decline of faculty autonomy and the rise of administration; the ever-growing emphasis on outcomes and assessment; the increasing focus on professional preparation (generally at the expense of the liberal arts); the promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary work; and the inevitable rifts between faculty and administration. But the book is distinguished by its use of the work of administration as the lens through which to examine higher education; by the wealth of connections it draws among cultural and historical trends both inside and far outside academe; and by Martin's inclination to see opportunities where many others often see only misdirection or plain disaster.
Inside Higher Ed conducted an e-mail interview with Martin, professor and chair of art and public policy at New York University, to gain a better understanding of the ideas detailed in his complex and ambitious book.
News: 'Under New Management' - Inside Higher Ed
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