Posts Tagged: faculty

Amid Attacks on Critical Race Theory, UMass Boston Launches Educational Leadership and Transformation Institute for Racial Justice

Since the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade in 2020, among countless others, UMass Boston leadership has publicly committed to becoming an antiracist and health-promoting university. The university’s stated institutional values and commitments are also intricately tied to an academic freedom that wholly defends the right to teach about race, gender and other ...

And Now For Something Completely Uncomfortable: Estate Planning for Academia During COVID-19

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.” Her words are excellent guideposts as New England colleges and universities navigate the unknowns of educating students during COVID-19. Despite the precautions that institutions are taking, on-campus teaching and research are not totally risk-free. Neither, of course, is life itself...

Undercover Professor: How Becoming a Student Made Me a Better Teacher

Three years ago, I graduated with an associate degree in liberal arts from Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Haverhill, Mass. Although I was one of over a thousand students to graduate that day, my situation was a little different than those of my peers. You see, I am a full-time faculty member at NECC with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. I had decided the year before to go undercover by...

Increasing Diversity in the Ranks of Full Professors—for Both Tenured and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

The goals of higher education—engaging the hearts and minds of our next generation, advancing novel and pragmatic solutions to the most pressing local and global problems—call for great passion and skill. That’s not the whole formula, though. Diversity performs its own powerful role. College faculties that represent a diversity of expertise, ideas and perspectives help create the kind of ...

Another Look at the Aims of Education

I was able to hear Stanley Fish speak at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in January 2004. Fish, a literary critic, had become dean of arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)—a position he has now vacated. Fish has published widely, usually upholding the ideals of our nation’s colleges and universities in his writing. ...

Key NLRB Decision Opens a Wide Door for Faculty Organizing

In a stunning and far-reaching decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) opened the door to union organizing among faculty at thousands of private-sector institutions, both secular and religious. The board’s majority decision in Pacific Lutheran University (12/16/14), issued in the face of powerful dissents, will inevitably spark controversy and ongoing litigation both about the leg...

Laying Down a Higher Education Innovation Challenge

Some notable developments in higher ed ... ... As Southern Maine goes, so goes the nation? College faculty and administrations get along a bit like Congress and the president. In the tradition of shared governance, the administration may offer a sharp change in business policy; the faculty applies the brakes. But at the University of Southern Maine, faculty leaders and President Theo Kalikow ar...

New Directions for Higher Education: Q&A with Education Scholar Adrianna Kezar on the Changing Faculty

In April 2013, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. Past installments of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing: Carnegie Foundation Pr...

Don’t Sweat the Big Stuff: Academic Innovation in all Shapes and Sizes

To listen as many of us incessantly complain, one would think academe is chronically resistant to change, new ideas and innovative programs. We often hear the smaller the stakes, the greater the petty battles—no opportunity is too minute to stall and impede. Before tenure, junior faculty need to be protected while they build their publications dossier; after tenure, they no longer need to ca...

Data Connection: State Work, Guns, Sports

In January, we revived the collection of facts and figures called "Data Connection" that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education. The latest ... Change in Connecticut State University System (CSUS) "administrative and residual" staff, fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2011: -15% Connecticut State University System Change in C...