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From the Editor: Another Kind of Service
Paula M. Krebs
Like all other colleges and universities, service academies issue degrees, but faculty at those military institutions face challenges beyond syllabus design and committee work. The officers who have written for this issue of Academe from the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, and West Point give us a view from inside the service academies.
Charged with helping to develop a policy on academic freedom, Jackson Niday and Kathleen Harrington at the United States Air Force Academy had to work out what special limits applied, if any, in the military context. Academic inquiry is free and unfettered. But the military runs on discipline. Can service academy faculty serve two masters?
Lucretia Flammang, who directs humanities education at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, is a literary critic and a writer at an institution that draws few students who see the humanities as central to their identity. How does this officer and humanist encourage cadets to tap the artist within? Take a look at her article to see how the Coast Guard Academy brings engineers and marine biologists to the arts.
Frank Galgano is a geographer at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where they understand global education in a way few other higher education institutions do. It’s not enough, he explains, for army officers to read maps—if they cannot understand and appreciate local cultures all over the world, they could make mistakes much more significant than those made by most of our graduates.
Mentors don’t have to share race, ethnicity, and gender with their mentees in order to be able to offer valuable encouragement and advice. Betty Neal Crutcher shares her research on cross-cultural mentoring with Academe, offering both stories from successful mentors and advice gleaned from their experience and her own.
Other topics tackled in this issue include faculty-administration tensions: William Tierney offers ways to avert what he calls the "nuclear option"—a no-confidence vote for a college president. Joseph Petrick details a SUNY visitation system that helps campuses that find themselves in faculty-president battles. The system provides an option whereby visitors from other SUNY campuses come to campus to help stabilize a volatile situation.
Pamela Caughie connects impassioned teaching, feminism, and academic freedom in her article in this issue, and in a complementary piece, feminist theologian Julie Kilmer argues for feminist pedagogy’s foundational role in liberal education.
Another pair of articles looks at parenting and higher education: Carol Keyes and Pamla Boulton discuss the evolution of a system of children’s centers throughout the CUNY schools, where each center is tailored to the needs of a different campus. Anne Stockdell-Giesler and Rebecca Ingalls analyze the way motherhood is constructed in today’s academy and talk about the activism around parenting issues at their own institution.
Be sure to check out the higher education news in Nota Bene and AAUP at Work, and read about what happened at the AAUP annual meeting in June. And be sure to send us your own stories, at editor@aaup.org or pkrebs@wheatonma.edu.
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