Most colleges and universities in the United States today offer one or more undergraduate courses on the Holocaust in History, Sociology, Literature, or other Humanities disciplines. Enrollments are strong, and many faculty members find themselves teaching such courses at the request of their chair or dean. However, most faculty will not have been…

According to the authors, in 2008 and 2009 a coalition of faculty, anchored by Women's Studies, challenged a proposal to bring United States Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) courses onto their urban public university campus. This proposal, initially approved by the faculty governance advisory committee on academic affairs, was…

Much has been written recently on the increased pace of scholarly life and its ill effects. More generally, work intensification has been identified as a widespread malaise in contemporary workplaces, and academia is no exception. In this article the authors make the argument that the kind of higher order thinking that is a critical part of the…

In this article, the author discusses her successes and struggles as a junior faculty member, in building critical community with and among a diverse group of graduate students. Drawing from and expanding upon the current literature, she presents a definition of critical communities and then makes an argument for why teachers need to promote…

In this article, the author presents his reflection about the song "Don't Cha" by the Pussy Cat Dolls (2006), which makes a strong statement in a postmodern way about women, and sometimes men, who see themselves in the world as central players in a dramatic narrative that highlights their own victimization as happy, powerful, and glorious. These…

This article presents an interview with Gary Olson on the changing contexts of the humanities in this modern world. He emphasizes that the humanities are absolutely essential when it comes to the very real-world problems. He explains that what he is saying not just applies to terrorism and economic crisis; the humanities equip everyone to deal…

Emerging from the entanglement of tensions with the perception that if one is a minority, female, and short, it would appear that one is likely never to get to the top of the corporate ladder. In addition to what people already know about the stark realities of gender and racial discrimination in the workplace, some studies suggest that physical…

In this article, the author focuses specifically on her teacher-body and its place in various dynamics of projection in the classroom in order to discuss how drawing on queer performativity can be a critical resource in teaching about normativity and otherness. Queer theory has challenged individuals to think more critically about their reliance…

In this article, the author addresses how the professor's body is perceived and how those perceptions influence promotion and tenure decisions. She observes that many writers have argued that the "normal professor body" is white, male, middle-class, middle-aged, able, heterosexual, and thin, which also describes the "normal body" in American…

Contemporary academic fiction features a plethora of characters, male and female, identified by a bodily defect or medical malady as a primary character trait. These representations of the damaged college professor have joined other popular academic stereotypes, such as the absent-minded professor, the lecherous professor, and the sadistic…

In this article, the author discusses various conceptions about the teacher's body. He states that the teacher's body is not just a pile of organs and meat in a skin corset. As part of the performance metaphor--commonly read as part of education-as-spectacle--it translates institutional systems and institutional ideas into a social order, and at…

In this article, the author profiles Jacques Derrida, whose teaching activity made an invaluable and indelible contribution to the intellectual life of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The question of pedagogy is central for Derrida, not only in terms of teaching people to read and write differently, but as a means for appreciating the…

In this article, the author seeks to address the present function of Canadian criticism by undertaking a meditation on the contemporary Canadian university and stating his own position as a critic of Canadian literature in this institutional framework. The author asks: What are the connections between neoliberalism and cultural nationalism in…

In the simplest terms, academic freedom means unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar's fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint. This indispensable principle of scholarship is the precious gift of independent intellectual judgment--an endowment of open inquiry, free investigation, speculation,…

Corporatization refers not only to the subordination of academic programs to outside business interest, but also to the more troubling intrusion of corporate forms of governance and market criteria of performance into the institution as a whole. In this paper, the author wants to show how this corporatization affects the substance, structure and…