College and university governance works best when every constituency within the institution has a clear understanding of its role with respect to the other constituencies. It works best when communication among the governing board, the administration, and the faculty (not to mention the staff and students) is regular, open, and honest. Too often…

Research, teaching, and service--the traditional tripartite division of academic work. The kind of institution and the nature of institutional priorities have some bearing on the arrangement of the first two parts, but service always comes last. From the authors' shared perspective as faculty members and administrators in writing studies, though,…

The question, "Who will bankroll poetry?", succinctly embodies what is now a widespread recognition that the humanities may have more to lose in the current budget wars than either the sciences or a number of technical fields. The only budget war that can unite individuals, rather than divide them, is one arguing that too much is being…

People's varied views of service come to the fore when they evaluate one another's work, most notably in promotion and tenure reviews. Those who have worked on such reviews may have observed the differences among their colleagues' service contributions. One faculty member may have served on an editorial board and evaluated grant proposals. Perhaps…

In this article, the author discusses the disparate reality of full-time academic labor in public institutions of higher education in the United States. As more and more reports on US higher education point to deteriorating conditions for faculty members and threats to their professional status, those who teach in colleges and universities need to…

Inside each of us, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips noted, are many lives competing to be lived. In this essay, the author describes how her educational and professional goals influenced her decision to delay having children. Now, at age 40, and having achieved tenure, she wonders if she may have waited too long for the "competing life" that…

The nationwide recession has exacerbated what was already a long-term trend in public higher education--declining state support has meant shifting the revenue stream from state appropriations to more burdensome student tuition rates. Seduced by the lure of rapid profits, some institutions have made matters worse by opting for high-risk…

Early on in her first tenure-track job at Michigan State University, in the late 1970s, the author happened to be riding the same train from Lansing, Michigan, to Chicago as the department chair who hired her, Alan Hollingsworth, who had since become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. It had taken her three years to land a tenure-track…

The author serves as the chair of the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) Assembly of State Conferences, the umbrella organization for individual state AAUP conferences; a moderator for Pandora's Project, a website for survivors of sexual abuse and assault; a volunteer for Veronica's Voice, a support program for women and girls…

A faculty member may be surprised to hear that the AAUP-affiliated United University Professions--one of the largest academic unions in the nation, with more than 33,000 members across New York State--includes a growing number of academic professionals who are not faculty members. Professionals at a public college or university range from the…

Efforts by state legislators to curtail collective bargaining or destroy public-sector unions, abolish tenure, and decrease funding for education are spreading throughout the country. This author states that the scapegoating and vilification of unions and teachers, however, are not new. The current attacks have historical parallels, when cries of…

In June 2009, North Carolina's Guilford College, a small liberal arts college with strong Quaker origins and a decidedly progressive image, announced that it had accepted a large grant from the BB&T Charitable Foundation--$500,000 over a ten-year period. As has been the case at some, but not all, of the colleges and universities that in recent…

At the turn of the twentieth century, the presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago issued declarations bolstering institutional resistance to attempts by external agencies to influence a faculty member's stance on issues of the day. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) emerged some…

In the past decade or so, the practice of faculty governance has become increasingly vexed by the proliferation of special-interest research and teaching centers sponsored by outside benefactors who expect to be involved in the content and management of programs they pay for. University administrations, strapped for resources and hungry for fame,…

New tenure-track faculty members come into academia expecting to be able to devote substantial energy and expertise to teaching. They often find, however, that they must learn to navigate a multitude of other, competing demands. Numerous interdisciplinary studies published in the last decade have demonstrated that the normative expectations of…