Frequently drawn from elite corporate backgrounds and, for public institutions, from pools of politically connected people, trustees usually have to be educated about shared governance. Corporate or political ties are scarcely reliable indices of the wisdom necessary to oversee institutions of higher learning, and some trustees, sadly, prove…

Boldness, defense, and the necessity of talking back remain as central to life with disability in one's time as in Francis Bacon's age. "Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold," Bacon wrote, "first, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time, by a general habit." Perhaps no word carries…

Funny thing about pebbles dropped and the ripples they create. The pebble the author dropped years ago was agreeing to serve as a student liaison to the department in her graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. That position, which normally meant little more than attendance at regularly scheduled graduate student and department…

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) members are likely to be familiar with the 1960 adaptation of Howard Fast's "Spartacus" by Stanley Kubrick and Dalton Trumbo, a rousing Kirk Douglas production widely credited with breaking the Hollywood blacklist. They are a bit less likely to be among the five or six million weekly viewers of…

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…

The silver tide of faculty retirement continues to ebb and flow. While much of today's scholarship on faculty retirement focuses on the financial implications for colleges and universities, arguing that older faculty members clog up the faculty pipeline, cost more in salary and benefits, and are ineffective teachers who fear technology, little…

Publication agreements vary by publisher and sometimes by contract as well. A number of such agreements now also include indemnity clauses. "Indemnifying a publisher" means agreeing to pay for any loss, damage, or liability incurred by the publisher, or it can mean that the publisher has the right to claim reimbursement for its loss, damage, or…

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…

Discussion of academic freedom usually focuses on faculty, and it usually refers to speech. That is the gist of the 1915 "General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure," appearing in the inaugural AAUP "Bulletin" as a kind of mission statement. Given the conditions of the American system of higher education--decentralized…

In this article, the author talks about the plight of conservatives within academia. He discusses the results of a study of politics in higher education. Using survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the author and his wife set about testing possible explanations for the ideological…

Scholars and teachers have long struggled to respond to the growing demand for interdisciplinary approaches to complex social issues. They come to the table with their own disciplinary perspectives (scholars more rigidly than students, perhaps), but they also recognize the limitations of investigating social issues through a single disciplinary…

It is time for midcareer feminists in the humanities to consider the legacy of their foremothers, as many of their mentors assume emerita status. While feminism has become a multiplicity of often divided feminisms, one constant is a desire to leave the world better than one found it. Service to one's institution, however, can be a professional…

During the 2010-11 academic year, Cabrini College began an evaluation of a faculty governance structure that had been implemented in fall 2007. The processes involved might serve as a roadmap for faculty members and administrators at other institutions who seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their governance model and improve shared…

It makes sense for college and university faculty to ally with the free and open-source software community. They share common values. A marvelous additional benefit is that free software on campuses would significantly advance pedagogy and scholarship, increase efficiency, and save money. Only unquestioning obedience to market fundamentalism--or…