In Praise of the 4-4 Load
My recent article “A Roadmap to Take Back Higher Education” got a mixed reaction from tradition-minded professors. They liked the general framework of the scale of the problem facing the…
Posts tagged with
“professors”
Agentic AI Comes for Teaching
Will agentic AI let teachers spend more time teaching, or will it remove even more of the human touch from the academy? This is one of higher education’s most important…
What Speech Rights Do Public-University Professors Have?
When professors in public universities teach their classes, are they engaged in government speech pursuant to their job duties, with First Amendment rights equal only to those of other government…
Don’t Yank the Sage From His Stage
“In most college classrooms,” wrote Alison King in a seminal 1993 article, “the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the ‘sage…
The Florida “Brain-Drain” Study Is Flawed
A new study by two University of Southern California economists claims that Florida’s 2022 post-tenure-review law caused a significant exodus of professors from the state’s public universities. According to researchers…
Universities’ Stalinesque Procedures Are Silencing Unpopular Professors
At one time, most Americans (and virtually all academics) would have agreed with the famous saying, often attributed to Voltaire, “While I disagree with what you say, I will defend…
Should Professors Be Career Mentors?
The original purpose of the university was simple: the academic formation of its students. Over the past several decades, however, society’s perception of higher-education institutions has grown to encompass numerous…
How Humanities Professors Got Marginalized
In any discussion of the state of the humanities, the first fact is a numerical one. In School Year 2021-22, while a little more than two million people earned bachelors’…
A Medical Professor Learns That Dissent About Diversity Won’t Be Tolerated
In the good old days of American education, professors could speak their minds freely. Disagreements would often result, with others disputing the case that the speaker had made. The solid…
Try Humble, Positive Modeling, Not Neutrality
The kerfuffle over the relative merit of forcing “viewpoint neutrality” in history classrooms puzzles me. No wonder: Although an historian by Ph.D., I have taught mostly economics for almost three…