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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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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On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors […]
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It’s hard to say just when universities ceased to believe that education was a worthwhile mission. But that they have done so is beyond question. Among many signs of this reality is the anxiety to redefine the university’s task. After all, educators who no longer expect or demand serious intellectual effort from their students are […]
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Bob Weissberg brought our attention to this job opening, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Italics mine: The Department of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, invites applications for a full-time tenured scholar focused on the theory and practice of social movements, civil society institutions and/or the third sector within neoliberalism. […]
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– The chancellor of the Washington D.C. public school system is considering a dual-track system of employment – one with lower pay and traditional job protections, and one with higher pay, fewer protections, and greater chances for raises. Richard Vedder suggests the same for universities: ..You can either go for job security or for higher […]
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Chancellor G. P. Peterson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, plans to raise $9 million to endow a visiting chair in conservative thought and policy, on grounds that intellectual diversity is a good thing. Like all radical ideas, having an unorthodox professor on campus sounds a bit risky, maybe even startling, but after some reflection, […]
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Among today’s postings is an article asking whether hiring professors strictly by excellence isn’t a way to guarantee that Catholic colleges will, in time, lose their Catholic character and become secular. The article, “Academic Excellence Is Not an Excellent Criterion“, is by Georgetown University associate professor of government Patrick Deneen and it appeared in the […]
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In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick – from 10% to 40% in a single year – drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No […]
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Randy Cohen, the New York Times “Ethicist”, offered a very slippery response to a reader last week, on the question of financial incentives for the hiring of minority professors. You’d best read the whole exchange first. My comments are beneath: I teach at a state university that offers financial incentives to hire minority candidates. A […]
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Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar and law professor at Duke for 21 years, has just been hired and then fired as the first dean of the University of California, Irvine, Law School, which opens in 2009. Irvine’s chancellor, Michael Drake, explained the firing by saying “he had not been aware of how Chemerinsky’s political […]
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Candace DeRussy, in Raise The Towers: A Call to Good Governance, a new paper from the Texas Public Policy Foundation offers a terse round-up of problems afflicting university governance, and offers a summary of several modes of reform. Her initial diagnosis is a sharp distillation of the problem: Paradoxically, it is the elusive dual nature […]
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