From the Editor: Weighing in on the Supreme Court
By Paula Krebs
In this issue, Robert O’Neil, from the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, gives us the context to understand the summer’s Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action in education. The rulings did not directly concern higher education but, as O’Neil explains, they will have far-reaching effects for college and graduate admissions and enrollments. You’ll want to read this article and share it with your colleagues.
Tel Aviv University’s Dan Rabinowitz and Ronen Shamir discuss the public nature of the tenure case of Barnard College’s Nadia Abu El-Haj. A group of Barnard alumnae and others organized an online petition drive to persuade the college to deny tenure to the Middle Eastern anthropology researcher whose controversial work focuses on ancient Israel, while supporters of her case set up their own petition. Should tenure be adjudicated on the Web? Ask Rabinowitz and Shamir.
This issue also features a cluster of articles about mission statements. The concept of the mission statement is an easy target for academic satirists Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George, who take us through one campus’s deliberations. James Berger records a humanities department’s resistance to the creation of what it sees as a corporate-inspired mission statement, but Jack Meacham speaks up in defense of the mission statement. He argues that creating and revisiting a campus mission statement can bring a college’s various constituencies together for important campus conversations. Is the mission statement here to stay, and has your faculty had its say?
I’m a fan of the Ms. Mentor column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I thought many Academe readers might be as well. So I interviewed the brains behind Ms. Mentor, Louisiana State University’s Emily Toth, to give her a chance to talk about her witty, sometimes controversial alter ego and the trends she sees, from her Ivory Tower, in higher education today.
In the latest installment in the Fighting Back series, Deborah Cooperstein brings us up to date on the long road to pay equity for women at Adelphi University, where the latest development is an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission federal-court lawsuit against the college. Why does the Adelphi administration choose to spend its resources fighting a lawsuit rather than compensating its female faculty members? Cooperstein lays out lessons for other campuses on how to handle problems of gender equity in compensation. Send us Fighting Back stories about activist efforts on your own campuses on issues of equity, academic freedom, or faculty governance.
Eugene Matusov and Robert Hampel lay out two alternatives for thinking about evaluating colleagues for tenure and promotion. You can use this article to help evaluate your own criteria.
Charlene D’Avanzo and Deborah Morris offer about the most humane version of teaching assessment you could imagine: get together with a bunch of folks who teach what you teach and figure out how you could do it better. Their article is positively inspirational. No reporting to anyone about your results, just working out for yourself what makes a difference. Take a look at this article—it can really change your relationship to your own teaching.
Angela Walmsley and Jeffrey McManemy want us to help students to develop character. And Oscar Wambuguh shares a wealth of suggestions for how to keep students alert, interested, and working hard in a three-hour evening class. I only hope his students know how lucky they are.
—Paula M. Krebs
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