From the Editor
By Paula Krebs
A New Academic Year
This first issue of the 2006–07 academic year is an unusual one, as you can already tell by its bulk. Some of you may have followed in the higher education press the saga of the AAUP conference on academic boycotts originally scheduled to take place in Bellagio, Italy, in February 2006. The conference organizers eventually canceled it, after much Sturm und Drang, but the issues that prompted the conference to begin with have not gone away. So the organizers invited the would-be conference participants to submit the papers they would have given at the conference for publication in Academe, in an issue generously funded by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Those papers make up the lion’s share of this issue, and they make for some compelling reading. See Joan Wallach Scott’s introduction to the section on pages 36–38.
The feature section for this issue, then, is slightly reduced in size to give you a chance to get through the magazine before the November–December issue arrives. The section includes a cluster of articles on a topic dear to my own heart, social class in the academy. I asked a faculty member whose work I knew and respected to take on the topic of staff-faculty relations and what they have to do with social class. As I might have expected, this faculty member did not resume to speak for secretarial, janitorial, and other staff colleagues but instead invited the staffers to speak for themselves. The result of their collaboration is “Class Issues Outside the Classroom,” which I hope will be the beginning of a discussion in these pages about the faculty’s roles and responsibilities in class dynamics on our campuses. Faculty have to take the initiative in addressing this issue; after all, this article has to be published anonymously, so the staffers who wrote do not lose their jobs.
Anthropologist Michael Shott’s article on class issues in the professoriate
arose in part from his study of class issues in his own field. One unexpected
result of his analysis was his finding that liberal arts colleges tend to privilege in hiring those who attended similar schools as undergraduates. As a liberal arts college faculty member myself, I can corroborate that finding anecdotally. I’m embarrassed to report that it never occurred to me to query the politics of ruling out candidates who had no “liberal arts college experience” until I read Shott’s piece.
Three members of the teacher education faculty at Regis University explain their sensitive and successful schemes for retaining working-class students in their program. The insights and strategies they share can help with retention of such students in any undergraduate program.
Kurt Smith, who testified in hearings held in Pennsylvania in response to neoconservative activist David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights,” gives us a critique of the so-called bill that grew out of his testimony. He approaches the topic from his own field, philosophy, and finds the bill convincing—if you believe in sophistry.
The Fighting Back feature returns this issue, with Dana Waller’s inspirational story about AAUP activists in Colorado who decided that it was time to be proactive about higher education issues at the state level. Their lobbying work has produced astonishing results. Also in Fighting Back, Theodore Hill outlines the ways he used open-records laws to help him blow the whistle on some shady practices at his institution.
Send us your own success stories for Fighting Back, let us know your ideas for feature articles, and visit our blog at http://academeonline.blogspot.com.
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