Opinion

Katherine Haley on how colleges can ensure that faculty members and trustees work together effectively on presidential search committees.

In opting for less money, and basing his compensation on performance, Purdue's new president is setting a model for higher education, writes Arthur Levine.

I am a sociologist. I teach some of those courses that many academics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. One such course is Sex, Gender, and Society. I also teach other courses or segments of other courses that deal with sexuality, globalization, imperialism, wars, religion, sweatshops. These are all difficult courses and topics to teach. Many of my colleagues think I am a glutton for punishment for wanting to teach these courses (if these weren’t enough I just added Sociology of the Body and Embodiment to the list of courses I teach).

The academic job market is a journey. A long, complex, stressful journey. I'm in the thick of this journey right now, having just arrived back from the Modern Language Association annual conference, where hundreds of scholarly hopefuls in English studies interviewed with search committees from universities all over the United States. Generally, the next step after a phone interview is a campus visit, wherein you travel to the interested university, interact with the faculty, staff and students, give a job talk, and possibly do a teaching demonstration. What follows is a bit of advice from my job mentors about what to expect during the campus visit, and what strategies you can use to be successful during it.

The book is out, and shipping! ----- Fearless prediction time: The City College of San Francisco will get some sort...

As we reported last week, we have started rolling out the results of our fall surveys with those newer-to-higher ed (“newbies”) and those that have been in higher ed for a longer period of time (“veterans”). Today we’ll let you know what these 464 people told us about why they decided to work in higher ed.

HigherEdTech, the edtech summit embedded in CES, kicked off this week with an incredible set of speakers and discussions. This is a conference that is top on my list to attend (impossible this year do to a local commitment), and I'm interested to hear the news and insights that come out of these discussions.

I’ve just started to read Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth by Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, which is a short book about our tendency to frame political and environmental issues around impending doom. It’s hard to do the work of change; so much easier to point out problems and wait for the collapse. And when faced with impossibly big problems – the economic crisis, global warming – we feel so small and helpless. The only equally big thing on offer is total ruin.