Posts from Old School, New School
Michael Brown and Mary Churchill sum up their beliefs and hopes for the future of higher education.
Counting public engagement in tenure-and-promotion decisions raises complex questions that need to settled so that scholars can be rewarded for their work as public intellectuals.
Vague programs can be ineffectual. Instead, let’s encourage faculty and students to do good in real communities of actual people.
Even worse than the anti-intellectualism rampant in U.S. society is an attitude within universities that doesn’t reward academics for public engagement.
When we suppress dissent among contingent faculty, under the mistaken notion that there is no place for politics on our campuses, says Mary Churchill, everyone loses—students, teachers, and society.
Politics is our recognition of a collective life—a civil society—and the humanities reveal our need for both, says Michael Brown.
Enough with theoretical debate and longing for a past that never was—institutions need to translate theories into practical changes that can actually be implemented now.
It’s time to save the humanities and social sciences from commercial policies and values that have no place in higher education, says Michael Brown.
Bringing together the realities of capitalism and the ideals of democracy is higher education’s pathway to a shared vision for the future.
The so-called attempt to “protect” the humanities is designed to protect other fields from anything that raises questions about the increasingly narrow ways in which they are defined.