Aaron Barlow

New Academe Faculty Editor Appointed

The AAUP has named Aaron Barlow, an associate professor of English at the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York, the new faculty editor of Academe. As editor, Barlow will retain his faculty position while working with the AAUP’s editorial staff and the Academe advisory board to solicit feature articles and edit the magazine. 

Pictures of an Education

In “My Pedagogic Creed,” John Dewey writes, “I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child’s powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child’s own nature.” Teaching centers on the student, not on learning outcomes or assessment.

Power and Competence

Last October, Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York, wrote a letter to CUNY faculty in which he claimed: “The authority for the governance of the University on all matters rests with the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees has delegated a significant role to the faculty on academic matters, and the faculty have the right to exercise their professional judgment in fulfilling that role.

"Good-Bye, Teacher…”

Behavioral psychologist Fred Keller’s essay “Good-Bye, Teacher . . .” appeared in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in spring 1968. Through it, Keller challenged teachers to experiment, providing his own “Personalized System of Instruction” as an example, and he warned teachers that if they did not start improving their methods, students would bypass them. At the end, he wrote: “I learned one very important thing: the student is always right.

From the Editor: In the Spirit of John Dewey

When I returned to academic life a decade ago, two personalities seemed to dominate public debate over the role of the scholar: David Horowitz and Michael Bérubé. The former wanted to push us back into ivory towers, teaching nothing but defined contents within our disciplines. The latter encouraged us to engage instead of retreating. The former would reduce us to resources for consumers. The latter would have us become a dynamic part of public debate.

From the Editor: The Professional Nitty Gritty

While we may wish to spend our time pondering academic freedom, new means of scholarship, philosophies of shared governance, and other grand questions surrounding higher education in the twenty-first century, our daily lives as faculty members are spent mostly among the trees, where we actually toil. It is there that we find the paths that lead us to understanding of the forest. Our work is certainly not divorced from our philosophizing. However, we often forget to mention, when we finally reach a promontory where we can see over the trees, just how it is we got there.

The AAUP in the Digital Universe(ity)

The universe of the Internet is changing both the AAUP and the university—and it will continue to do so. The AAUP, an organization that once could focus primarily on matters of particular concern to the faculty, now finds that it must react to a much wider range of issues and address a wider population. Universities that once were able to solve many of their problems out of public sight now find that almost everything they do is subject to comment. The privilege of privacy has disappeared—for all of us.

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