Higher Ed Archives - Page 3 of 4

Higher Ed

The Campus After COVID-19

Infrastructures of “innovation” have produced new forms of surveillance and compliance that will refigure the post-pandemic campus

March 4, 2021 • by Bonnie Mak and Hallam Stevens

_____ Campuses around the world continue to engage in a dangerous experiment: welcoming students back to class even as Covid-19 and its more infectious variants spread. On campus, just as elsewhere, a successful and sustained reopening relies on those who are among the most vulnerable: custodial and maintenance staff and essential ...

Feminism

Women’s History, An Origin Story

In 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published “The Female World of Love and Ritual, and changed how my generation of feminists understood the practice of history

March 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

I first encountered Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in 1978. I was twenty and a junior at Yale. A teaching assistant passed it on to me when I met with her after class: a paper was due and my mind was empty. She said that there ...

Activism

Black Swans No More!

When Things Fall Apart, a New Role for Community-Engaged Scholars

February 15, 2021 • by Trebor Scholz

As the pandemic has worn on, I have found myself devoting more and more of my time to conversations with researchers who have one foot in the world of alternative economies. I talked with dozens of Ph.D. students who self-identify as scholar-activists; they don’t want to stop at an analysis ...

Higher Ed

A Relevant Education

The New School in the 1960s

February 12, 2021 • by Howard Kirschenbaum

———— After such a vital summer of civil rights work in Mississippi in 1964, I could not see returning to the ivory tower of Johns Hopkins, where most academic courses seemed to have no relevance to the real world issues that concerned me. Shortly after returning from the Democratic National Convention ...

Higher Ed

What is Expertise Worth?

Wikipedia, credentials, and the democratization of knowledge

December 17, 2020 • by Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler

A recent email solicitation from a freelance writer made the rounds among faculty at the University of Virginia. “You are not on Wikipedia!” the author exclaims with apparent amazement, despite the fact that “academics who have accomplished much less have Wikipedia pages.” Anyone who knows Wikipedia also knows that you ...

Education

Why The New School Will Survive

An imprudent venture in historical context

October 22, 2020 • by Judith Friedlander

Ginia Bellafante is not the first reporter at The New York Times to call attention to the serious financial troubles of The New School. Since its founding in 1919, the university has repeatedly faced major budgetary shortfalls, the details of which the Times has faithfully and dramatically recorded. Each time, The ...

Higher Ed

The Tenured Radical

A brief character study

October 22, 2020 • by Aurora Borealis

------ The tenured radical is a mean creature. No blunder is too small to point out and magnify, no conversation too anodyne to incite accusations of “violence” and “colonization.” To them, there is no difference between The Jakarta Method and a white colleague speaking too much at a faculty meeting. Violence ...

Higher Ed

Why Does White Fragility Never Break?

The Framing of Racism in Higher Education

September 22, 2020 • by Benjamin P. Davis

------ When I was a graduate student at Emory University in 2018, the law school suspended a professor, Paul Zwier, for using the N-word in class. Zwier’s response to the suspension was strange. Inside Higher Ed reported on a letter in which he said, “I’m not sure whether I used the ...

Higher Ed

COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Moving online and volunteering for vaccine trials this Fall requires a more prudent courage than reopening college campuses for classes and football

September 16, 2020 • by Edwin Michael and Eileen Hunt Botting

––––––– The next time you check the COVID-19 dashboard of your favorite university on your laptop screen, imagine asking: Who’s the bravest of them all? Pretend you’re like the Evil Queen in Snow White, who gazes in a mirror, asking who is the fairest of them all, in order to eliminate ...

COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Education

Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

A review of Jennifer Hirsch’s and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

September 10, 2020 • by Emily Rutherford

------------- A decade ago, I was a resident adviser in a residential college at a highly selective university. My colleagues and I used to roll our eyes at the highly legalistic "affirmative consent" model of sexual education that we were asked to teach first-year students. Focused on the idea that sexual ...

Higher Ed

What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Scholars have been grousing about the expense of annual meetings for years. The pandemic is our opportunity to imagine change

September 3, 2020 • by Sara Georgini

----------- Why do we conference? Scholarship, dialogue, and community are all good answers to that question. But as the Covid-19 pandemic remapped our lives and shuttered American institutions last spring, the Society of United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) took stock of our annual meeting plans. Suddenly, answering that question became urgent. We had set ...

What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Higher Ed

The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Universities like UNC are going online for the public good, while other universities persist in reopening for perceived prestige and elite branding

August 24, 2020 • by Eileen Hunt Botting and Edwin Michael

Yet despite the rapidly escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases on campus, this elite private Catholic research university has kept its undergraduates in the dormitories at full capacity, and expressed its intention to reopen its campus again by Labor Day weekend for in-person classes, work, and other activities including Division I ...