By William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin. The occasional tendency to link the focused concept of academic freedom to the much broader concept of "shared governance" reinforces the need to re-examine how shared governance should be thought about. The first thoroughgoing attempt to link the two concepts seems to have been the adoption in 1966 by the American Association of University Professors of its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which it had jointly formulated with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Then, in 1998, the AGB issued its own Statement on Institutional Governance, which was widely read as pushing back on active faculty involvement in addressing issues of many kinds. More...

By Sean Wilentz. In the very first paragraph of The New Republic’s very first issue, the founding editors proclaimed their belief that there was a place in America for what they called "a journal of interpretation and opinion." These men—Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann—were eminences of the Progressive Era, who were repulsed by what had become of the nation’s business civilization. They aimed, as Croly later put it, a bit grandly, to help "mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal." More...

By Jeffrey J. Williams. Paris. February 26, 1635. The Abbé François de Boisrobert stands before the newly minted Académie française and denounces Homer as a base street poet who eked out a living by declaiming his verses to the mob. Boisrobert’s impassioned speech was perhaps the first skirmish in la querelle des anciens et des modernes, whereby one group of writers sought to differentiate themselves from those who paid undue deference to the Greek and Latin poets. But the ancients couldn’t be dislodged so easily. When the corpus of Western literature consisted largely of two dozen writers who had set the standard for plays, essays, verse, and satires, it was no simple matter to consign them to the past, especially when the past was still present. More...

By Jeffrey J. Williams. Literary criticism once had an outsize reach, influencing the terms and concepts of disciplines like art and legal studies. With it came an outsize ego. During the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of literary theory, scholars aimed to explode the foundations of Western metaphysics, foment a revolution of the sign, overturn gender hierarchies, and fight the class struggle. More...

By Eric Kelderman and Scott Carlson. President Obama’s proposal to make community college free is getting an enthusiastic reception from two-year colleges and their advocates across the nation. Not surprisingly, though, representatives of other higher-education sectors aren’t quite so bullish. One of their greatest fears: that the plan, if enacted, could end up pushing a large number of students away from their institutions and into community colleges. More...

By Jennifer Howard. Historians discuss a flash point for protest and their role in explaining it.
On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo., a white police officer shot an unarmed young black man dead. To understand what happened that day, you need more than details about what went down between the officer, Darren Wilson, and the victim, Michael Brown. You need history. More...

By Madeline Will. Three major higher-education groups on Thursday introduced a framework that seeks to guide public discussions of the value of a college education, at a time when many institutions are facing heightened scrutiny over their cost and how well their graduates do.
The effort, known as the Post-Collegiate Outcomes Initiative, is a project of the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. More...