There has been a long culture war over the validity of "Wikipedia" for research. Many university departments banned it as a primary source starting around 2007, but many others still allow it as a heuristic prompt. Certainly, one knows that students are still going to "Wikipedia" and dabbling in it. This reflects a recent gain in "Wikipedia"…

Outside work can complement what goes on in the classroom in ways that benefit both the community and students. Of course, AQ readers may have heard of tendentious programs and faculty ideologues, who channel student enthusiasm into partisan activism. Still, statistical survey analysis presented here by Mary Prentice suggests that participation in…

The tally of occurrences of a PC buzzword on academic and other websites seems to corroborate the suspicion that we're quickly abandoning "e pluribus unum" as the governing principle for treating individuals justly. In its place is the new image of America as a melange of competing interest groups. In this NAS research on comparative usage,…

Apparently, the department of agriculture is the last bastion for ideological pluralism in the modern American academy. Almost everywhere else, according to research by Stanley Rothman et al., a monolithic liberal orthodoxy holds sway, rewarding its own and conferring career disadvantage upon scholars deemed politically inconvenient. As his…

During the past 35 years, Seymour Martin Lipset and his collaborators have generated a series of studies and reports on the political alignment in academia. They have all found the social sciences and humanities to be preponderantly Democratic. In the past decade there has been little scholarly inquiry into the political orientation of faculty.…