When the pandemic brought life to a screeching halt and forcefully shuttered schools across the country, few were aware that a crisis in public education was already well underway. COVID-19 may have been an unexpected and devastating shock to the system, but a virus had already taken hold, leaving Canada's public-school systems vulnerable at the…

As the non-tenure-track (NTT) cohort of writing faculty grows, departments and programs need to provide equitable working conditions for all faculty, including reasonable workloads and protections against unnecessary changes; access to shared governance and curricular decisions; transparent and fair hiring, evaluation, and renewal processes;…

In this article, David Watson debates the pros and cons of leadership skills in both a small and large university. Watson relates his own experiences regarding the changing atmosphere of leadership. He states that his experiences have caused him to reflect on what is genuinely generic about individual capacities for institutional leadership: that…

In recent years, some very smart people--like Michael Berube, Marc Bousquet, Anthony Grafton, and William Pannapacker, to name a few--have offered on these pages their thoughts about how to fix graduate education and, by extension, the academic labor market, which, everyone seems to agree, has "unraveled". The author approaches this issue from a…

This commentary on Bryan Brayboy's 2011 Presidential address to the Council on Anthropology & Education focuses on the concepts and performance embedded in Dr. Brayboy's demonstration of "how his stories are his theories." Central concepts are academic life in a neoliberal world driven by the myth of disinterested markets, CAE's clear mission of…

Facing a cutthroat academic job market, many doctoral students are now willing to explore the possibility of a community-college career. And they have many questions. In Part 1 of this series, the author focused on the hiring process at two-year colleges and answered some common questions like "Do I have to have a Ph.D. to teach in that sector?"…

In this article, the author discusses how universities and the academics who work in them understand the relationship between teaching and research. In several countries, acknowledgement of the need to link teaching and research has led to the development of institutional strategies to achieve this goal. In South Africa, the linking of teaching…

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about how contingent faculty might improve their working conditions through various kinds of alliances. (Contains 1 note.)

In this essay, the authors talk about higher degree supervision as a human relationship, and shares how to supervise a PhD. There's a tendency now to talk about supervision as if it's a technical process one needs to learn the rules of. This paper urges educators to think about this as a human educational relationship, which has all the ups and…

The author began teaching at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1970s. In this article, the author shares two memories of those times on campus. The first was looking out his office window and seeing Iranian students marching on campus, shouting, "The Shah is a Fascist Pig." The second memory provoked this paper. It made the author…

Academics who specialise in improving the teaching of "hard" sciences like chemistry, biology, maths and physics are increasing in number and influence at Australian universities. Those in academia who have channelled their energies into teaching are delighted with this development. It means that many committed tertiary teachers can now look…

"Culture Currents" presents the books, essays, poetry, performances, music, websites, and other cultural media influencing educational leaders. "Culture Currents" is a snapshot, a peek behind the scenes. It reveals what people are reading or seeing that may not be normally mentioned or cited in their academic work. Two leaders…

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty's relations with the profession of English studies in general. (Contains 3 notes.)

Graduate students across the world in higher education have self-selected themselves into their chosen degree programs, and each student tends to be assigned an advisor, or multiple advisors, to assist them through these programs. Graduate students tend to be self-directed and read most, if not all, of the literature supplied by an institution to…

The purpose of this volume is to review and synthesize the literature on the American higher education faculty over the last fifteen to twenty years. As career-long students of higher education and the professoriate in particular, the authors have each studied the academic profession for many years, conducting hundreds of interviews with faculty…