22/05/2024
Ousted chancellor Joe Gow: "I knew this day might come, but I didn’t expect it to arrive so quickly."
The University of Wisconsin system took my chancellorship. Now it wants my job.
Chronicle Review
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A magazine of ideas and opinion from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
07/05/2024
"Once the game theory revolution was complete and the textbooks were rewritten, economic theory reached a stage of consolidation and gradually reassumed its traditionally marginal position in the professional landscape." - Ran Spiegler
Once central to the field, it has slipped in prestige.
06/03/2024
“Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge-fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high-school football game in Waco, Tex. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people.” - The Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025"
The sector isn’t prepared to defend itself.
27/02/2024
"Lilly resolved to extensively test the drug on the animals before he would try it again himself. But he was reassured about the risks, he wrote, when “the six dolphins tested apparently had very good trips.”"
How a 1960s interspecies-communication experiment went haywire.
25/01/2024
"De-bloat the administration is a slogan, not an idea for what higher education should be."
It’s time to acknowledge that progressive aims are in conflict.
24/01/2024
"Some of the proposed changes could help, but even those have shortcomings and need modifications."
A new bill offers some needed reforms, but it’s far from perfect.
19/10/2023
Will online education "disrupt" and "remake" traditional higher ed as we know it? No, argues Mark Garrett Cooper.
Our system is more resilient than would-be disrupters think.
25/09/2023
Brian Rosenberg: "If maintenance of the status quo is the goal, higher education has managed to create the ideal system."
The academy excels at preserving the status quo. It’s time to evolve.
19/07/2023
“We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” trustee Christopher Rufo tweeted. Later that day, he announced his plan to visit New College with a “landing team.” There was talk of “recapturing higher education” and laying “siege.” By Monday, Rufo confirmed a charge leveled at him in The New York Times: “We are organizing a ‘hostile takeover.’”
Here’s how to fight for academic freedom — and prevent political meddling.
11/07/2023
"The majority opinion was preordained, but the dishonesty and cowardice of that opinion and the concurrences are still breathtaking."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-supreme-courts-segregationists
Colleges must follow the law. But they don’t need to help the court fulfill its worst ambitions.
29/06/2023
"The SCOTUS decision may strike some as an irrevocable setback. Seeming yet another blow in the salvo against social justice we’ve been witnessing, this development can appear a win for the wrong side. But it doesn’t have to be that way."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-comes-after-affirmative-action
The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t need to be a setback for social justice.
23/06/2023
"My parents believed that people who took escapist holidays were the unlucky ones: uninspired drones performing alienated labor, whether punching a clock on the assembly line or closing million-dollar deals in a soulless corporate tower, dreaming of days off."
"They, on the other hand, were blessed to be paid to “pursue a life of the mind,” a job — sorry, calling — that required understanding, as my father would gush, “the entire world as a text ripe for interpretation.”" - Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:
New books by Jenny Odell and Sheila Liming argue that our productivity culture is deeply flawed.
22/06/2023
"Many of my younger colleagues seem to presume that tenure-track work exists in a mercantile economy, in which a finite number of jobs ought to be transferred from generation to generation. But that’s not so and never has been"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/should-you-retire-early
A Q&A with two academics, in English and history, on the intricacies of the decision to end a faculty career.
31/05/2023
"The greatest dangers to higher ed do not come from our students, but from the rising tide of state censorship. Against that threat, an enervating model of university neutrality will only muzzle us and hasten the erosion of our values."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/statehouses-not-student-activists-are-the-real-threat-to-free-speech
Fixating on drama at Stanford Law leads us astray.
12/05/2023
"You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/im-a-student-you-have-no-idea-how-much-were-using-chatgpt
No professor or software could ever pick up on it.
04/05/2023
"The administrators I worked for and alongside often said that they didn’t believe chief diversity officers did anything effective at all"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-dei-lip-service
On my disillusioning experience as a chief diversity officer.
28/04/2023
https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-lessons-for-higher-eds-least-powerful-administrators
What department chairs can learn about leadership from “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
25/04/2023
"Professors love to trash tech talk, not least in the pages of The Chronicle."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-professors-tech-paranoia-hinders-higher-ed
Rejecting innovation won’t convince an increasingly skeptical society of our value.
10/04/2023
"Faced with this vicious wave of disinvestment, Wingard and his fellow reformers don’t advocate for a greater public commitment to education. Instead, they double down on the privatization, subcontracting, and outsourcing of the tottering remnants of our once-great public system."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-grim-soulless-ed-techified-future
Temple’s Jason Wingard championed ‘skillification.’ He’s out, but his vision lives on.
16/03/2023
"We’ve become overly concerned with the tactics and strategies — rather than the meanings — of our jobs. We’ve placed obstacles in the way of talking authentically to one another about what we care about most. If we can resurrect a sense of wonder in what we teach and in the delightful idiosyncrasy of our peers and our students, conversation — and collegiality — will take care of itself."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-lost-art-of-academic-conversation
Faculty members no longer have time to indulge in the free play of ideas.
10/03/2023
"The annual conference, once the site of great disciplinary vigor, now merely rehashes a grander academic past and rehearses the Ph.D. candidates’ tales of looming professional woe."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/down-and-out-at-the-aha
History is facing a jobs crisis. Why doesn’t the field talk about it more?
09/03/2023
"That they want the safety — or the illusion of safety — provided by the corrective apparatus is also understandable. Only a fool would not crave safety in the face of what is happening now. But while the corrective apparatus is providing a measure of control, it cannot really provide safety. Metaphorically, it is making sure that the crusts are cut off all the sandwiches and that no dishes are left in the sink while zombie hordes beat on the walls and stick their hands through the windows."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-trials-of-the-young
The kids are not all right.
01/03/2023
"To fight the human tendency to see one’s place in the world as deserved, elite colleges would have to try to keep meritocratic beliefs from forming in the first place, and, after they arise, combat them vigilantly. However, they do almost precisely the opposite."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/where-rich-students-are-told-you-deserve-this
At elite colleges the “best and brightest” are shamelessly flattered.
27/02/2023
"Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/desantiss-terrifying-plot-against-higher-ed
Even conservatives should oppose the Florida governor.
03/02/2023
"Every semester, thousands of American literary scholars concoct new interpretations of works of literature and new arguments about literary studies itself. They assume, pretend, hope, or dream that their words carry the revolutionary force of radical policy reform... It’s a curious overestimation of muscle for a discipline whose landmarks include Don Quixote and Madame Bovary — novels about people who confuse books with life."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/can-literary-scholars-transcend-their-training
The field has painted itself into a corner. John Guillory offers a way out.
26/01/2023
"When even tenured professors have reason to fear for their jobs, adjunct faculty are left feeling more expendable than ever."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-armageddon
The demographic cliff is nearing. Adjuncts like me are the first to suffer.
19/01/2023
"It gives me no pleasure to say that the system I have dedicated my entire life to is broken — that it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Some will surely disagree with me, proposing modest reforms aimed at improving the working conditions of faculty. There will be well-meaning panels at annual conferences on “the state of the profession,” and initiatives to shift official language and policies to better include contingent faculty and graduate students. But in my opinion, we are past the point where such steps can offer true relief. We need a revolution, not a revision."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-academic-career-is-broken
For overburdened workers, modest reforms aren’t nearly enough.
17/01/2023
"Blasphemy is not a valid criticism of university teaching." https://www.chronicle.com/article/blasphemy-is-not-a-dei-issue
The Hamline case does not illustrate a tension between diversity and academic freedom.
13/01/2023
"This is a strange spectacle. A professor of religion is physically prevented by his academic colleagues from sharing the fruits of his expertise at an event on campus. His opponent is neither a religious official nor a scholar, but the leader of a civil-rights organization. Scholarly knowledge is considered here a kind of affront to community feeling. What conventions of etiquette, or what distribution of authority, were in place in order to silence Berkson?"
https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-review/2023-01-17
Religious orthodoxy, academic freedom, and a divided advocacy group make a perfect storm.
09/01/2023
"There was Mario, in a suit and tie, surrounded by the publishing house’s sales team, men and women in their 30s, 40s — all of them American — with that shyness typical of the university set..."
https://www.chronicle.com/article/you-dont-know-about-nobel-prize-winners
Having a Nobel laureate on campus can be chaos, as the case of Mario Vargas Llosa at Princeton shows.
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