professors

The Withering Away of the College Professor

An excerpt from the book American Heresies and Higher Education Some conservatives say that the main cost-control issue in American higher education today is tenured faculty who don’t teach enough. It would be better if their lazy self-indulgence could be better controlled by more accountable administrators. Tenure, from this view, is a kind of union, […]

ARE SCOTT WALKER’S UNIVERSITY BUDGET CUTS A WIN FOR STUDENTS?

Should college professors teach more? Specifically, should professors at public research universities devote more time to teaching undergraduates, and less to research? In two states this, um, academic question has become a political controversy, one likely to crop up elsewhere. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican presidential candidate, has proposed a tuition freeze and […]

Out of Sync: America’s University Faculty

Entitled Professors Try a Coup in Maine

Maine’s higher education structure is a little unusual. The flagship university, in Orono, is too remote from the state’s economic and cultural core on the Kittery-to-Rockland coastline. The state’s second-largest public university, the University of Southern Maine, has campuses in Portland and nearby Gorham, but long had a reputation as a more second-tier institution.

Yes, College Professors Can Work Harder

David C. Levy’s Washington Post article, “Do college professors work hard enough?” set off quite the firestorm. His basic point was that we currently “pay for teaching time of nine to fifteen hours per week for 30 weeks,” but that If the higher education community were to adjust its schedules and semester structure so that […]

An Academy Made Up of Adjuncts?

The Chronicle recently featured an article about the Adjunct Project, a program put together by a University of Georgia adjunct named Joshua Boldt “asking fellow adjuncts to enter information about their pay and working conditions.” Adjuncts are often underpaid. They also generally do not have research or service expectations, and they are almost never hired […]

Another Blow to the Humanities

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the results of

More on Professors and Unionization

As K C Johnson noted here yesterday, Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels have a conversation at the New York Timesopinionator blog in which both advocate unionization (see here).  Their immediate target is an op-ed by Naomi Schaefer Riley in USA Today entitled “Why Unions Hurt Higher Education” (see here). It should be noted that Michaels and Fish are both English professors, which puts them in […]

Why Do Humanities Profs Complain?

Spend some time among humanities researchers and it won’t be long before you hear complaints about lack of support. They grumble that while the sciences have countless sources and billions of dollars pouring into their labs and clinics and field work, the humanities have NEH, a smattering of foundations giving fellowships, a handful of humanities […]