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From the Editor: Your Organization, Your Magazine
Paula M. Krebs
The AAUP remains a big presence in the mainstream media this year, as it responds to the many and varied challenges to academic freedom that have arisen both at colleges and universities and in state legislatures. Higher education publications as well as mainstream news outlets seek out the AAUP for the pro-academic-freedom perspective on recent controversies.
The magazine you’re reading is not part of the mainstream media, however, and you can expect to find in its pages a fuller story, a richer understanding of the issues at stake in the political and cultural battles taking place around higher education in the United States today. In Academe, AAUP members get more than a quotable reaction to the controversies generated by David Horowitz or Ward Churchill.
In Academe, we read analyses of issues the newspapers, television, and radio underplay or ignore, as in the article by Robert Drago and his colleagues about the ways faculty members try to avoid being “tainted” by taking family leave, or Patrick Brantlinger’s and Donald Collins’s reflections about scholar-activism abroad and at home.
We get the inside story behind the issues that appear in the newspapers, as in Steven Selden’s exposé of the funding behind conservative campus initiatives, or Christine Farris’s subtle exploration of the issues involved in an “apprenticeship” model of graduate student teaching.
We are handed practical, nuts-and-bolts instruction in how to do our jobs better in the face of institutional obstacles: Grant Ingle’s contribution on campus diversity initiatives, for example, should make for more successful projects at all kinds of colleges and universities.
We can laugh, as Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George encourage us to consider the problem of why there are so many “acaDemocrats.” We read interviews with the people who make things happen in the organization—historian Joan Wallach Scott shares her insights on the importance of the work of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. And we can find inspiration in, for example, the magazine’s new “Fighting Back” feature, which showcases the ways faculty members at four different kinds of institutions are making changes at their colleges, often in contexts of enormous outside political pressure.
To stay in closer touch with our members, Academe would like to engage in more electronic exchange. You’ll soon be able to register your e-mail address at the new AAUP members-only Web site. We’ll let you know as soon as this feature is available. As a benefit to our members, we will send you Academe’s new periodic electronic update to keep you posted on what’s coming up in the magazine, and other news on AAUP policies and actions. Please forward the updates and news alerts to your colleagues who have not yet joined the AAUP—they’ll soon understand why it’s so important, in this period of attacks on academic freedom and tenure.
Just as we want to reach out to readers, we welcome readers reaching in to us. As always, send your suggestions to editor@aaup.org, and your letters commenting on our news stories or features to academe@aaup.org. You can also write to us at Academe, AAUP, 1012 Fourteenth St., NW, Suite 500 , Washington , DC 20005-3465.
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