Faculty Forum

Faculty Forum: Against Assessment

Not long ago, I was in one of those now ubiquitous committee meetings on institutional assessment. As I listened to the speaker earnestly describe objectives and outcomes and a vast three-dimensional matrix filled with yet-to-be-obtained data, I cringed and sank lower in my seat. I hoped that my wincing would be mistaken for what it was fast becoming: a throbbing headache.

Faculty Forum: The End of the Book

The booksellers at Amazon.com are inviting you to view a brief Web video touting the virtues of their e-book reader. Unlike its competitor from Sony, the Kindle 2 doesn’t pretend to look like a book. At eight inches tall by five inches wide and a third of an inch thick, it looks like what it is—a tablet. The screen displays a black text against a white background and the print can be adjusted to your comfort. If you’re still not comfortable, you can sit back, turn on the sound, and have the device read the text to you.

Faculty Forum: Assessment Metaphors We Live By

The range of assessment metaphors circulating in higher education reflects the diversity of understandings of assessment. Assessment is a tool for measurement, a process for improvement, and a medium of communication. Its practice at once requires and produces a “culture” of assessment, evidence, accountability, or learning, and students correspondingly figure as participants, objects of study, consumers, or agents of their own learning.

Faculty Forum: Ways to Organize Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

Lecturers, adjuncts, instructors, postdocs, visiting professors, graduate student teachers, and others in non-tenure-track positions now constitute the great majority of faculty in US higher education. But many college and university policies were written decades ago and barely acknowledge the existence of faculty like me who work in contingent appointments.

Faculty Forum: Cary Nelson: An Appreciation

I was elected to the national Council of the AAUP in 2005, just as Cary Nelson was running for the presidency. My first year on the Council was intensely dismaying. Academic freedom was under threat, the culture wars had been reheated in the aftermath of September 11, and David Horowitz was urging state legislatures to pass his “Academic Bill of Rights” to combat what he considered leftist indoctrination in the classroom. Tenure was being eroded by the overuse and exploitation of faculty hired off the tenure track.

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