In the fall of 2017, the University of Florida (UF) and the city of Gainesville were part of a coda to a terrible event in recent U.S. history: the violent torch-wielding rally of white supremacists and extreme far-right groups in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three people dead and at least 33 injured. These events…

In 2008, in the case of the "District of Columbia vs. Heller," which involved a district law banning most handguns, the U. S. Supreme Court declared that the Second Amendment protects citizens' rights to self-defense and that the federal government cannot prohibit guns in homes. Two years later, the Court further made clear that the…

Academic freedom gives professors broad discretion over expressions and interactions in the classroom. Free speech guidelines and First Amendment protections permit students to speak their minds too, but they offer very limited guidance as to how classrooms should operate. While professors should obviously work within free speech parameters in the…

While higher education has typically included exposure to the values and ethos of the liberal arts, traditional liberal arts education has been in retreat and under threat for a while now. What role has the assessment movement had on this retreat? Is assessment, in fact, part of the deterioration of higher education? Assessment in academia began…

When discussing the role of higher education as it applies to students, responses often devolve into two opposing camps: one for people who advocate for and defend the role of liberal arts education as basic to the preservation of democracy and freedom, and the other for people who care about the connection between what students learn in…

Making classes larger saves money--and public universities across the country have found it a useful strategy to balance their budgets after decades of state funding cuts and increases to infrastructure costs. Where this author teaches, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, Northridge (CSUN),…

Maureen Curtin, associate professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Oswego, reports in this article on an initiative that is designed to spur teams of faculty and visiting artists to teach "intellectual issues" through students' storytelling. The courses were part of the…

The push for increased use of online teaching in colleges and universities has been gaining momentum for some time, but even in that context the recent enthusiasm for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), free online courses that often enroll tens of thousands of students, is remarkable and rightly dubbed "MOOC Mania." As with so many…

This author is dropping out from the first college course he has taken in more than 20 years. As a tenured professor, he obviously does not have much to lose from this decision. On the other hand, nobody really seems to care anyway whether he is participating or not. He has been MOOC(h)ing of late. Definition of this lovely neologism? Taking part…

With America's military out of Iraq, and funding for global military operations on the decline, thousands of newly discharged men and women are trying to figure out "What's next?" Most of the Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, and Sailors joined the military before their 21st birthday, and it is often the only job they have ever held. While it is true…

Student ratings, first introduced into the college classroom in the late 1920s, have long symbolized the often uneasy relationship between undergraduates and their professors. Certainly, research about student ratings has been exhaustive over the last 50 years. Several thousand studies have been published, many concerned with issues of validity…

This article discusses a growing problem with civility and relationships between college professors and students. There is a recognition that these relationships are fraught with tension, and it is becoming clear that the massive presence of the "Net" in college students' lives is contributing to that tension. By casting a glance at why…

A belief in individualism and opportunity is deeply ingrained in the American character. Anyone, the litany goes, has a chance to make a fortune, ascend the corporate ladder, gain election to public office, hit a home run, or earn a college degree if only he or she will draw on a combination of talent and dedication. Yet nowhere is this clash of…

In this article, the author asks: Why, after years of discussion about access and diversity, are there still so few women and faculty of color in American colleges and universities?" African American women are only one demographic that has been excluded or marginalized in academia, but they offer an intriguing entry point into the discussion…

Alexis Pogorelskin, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth and chair of the History Department, recounts her experience in 2004 after making a controversial comment in her History of the Holocaust and 20th Century Russia class. Her comment was in reference to President Bush making no mention in the 2000 campaign about the…