By Kerry Ann Rockquemore. I understand how unsettling the tenure-track years can be, and I know that for many faculty members the year you are under review is the pinnacle of that stress. I agree that the system we currently use to evaluate faculty for tenure is unnecessarily lengthy and opaque, but I don’t imagine your campus will be changing its tenure process before you come up for review. Read more...

By Kerry Ann Rockquemore. Take a deep breath -- it’s going to be OK. You’re not the only one feeling like you blinked and all of the sudden the beginning of the new school year is right around the corner (this note is actually a composite of the requests I’ve received in the past week). Read more...

By Kerry Ann Rockquemore. Thanks for being so honest about how difficult it is for you to take time off from work. Many academics struggle with placing healthy boundaries around work, allowing themselves to experience non-work-related pleasure, and managing the ever-present fear of not winning tenure. Read more...

By Peter Stokes. It’s taken decades, but educational technology is finally beginning to change the way we think about education itself -- not just the way we deliver it. Read more...

By Stephen L. Chew. Early in my career, there was an incident involving a senior professor in another department. He was a mild-mannered man but deeply embittered about his career. He began savagely berating students in feedback on assignments and writing vitriolic reviews of junior faculty members. Read more...

By Laura Stark. Last week, an independent investigation of the American Psychological Association found that several of its leaders aided the U.S. Department of Defense’s controversial enhanced interrogation program by loosing constraints on military psychologists. It was another bombshell in the ongoing saga of the U.S. war on terror in which psychologists have long served as foot soldiers. Now, it appears, psychologists were among its instigators, too. Read more...

By Christopher Newfield. It’s a widely noted fact that colleges and universities are under new pressure to justify their value and function. The same is true of tenure-track faculty members, who are at the heart of the higher education system whose benefits much of society now claims to find mysterious, and whose job security is increasingly criticized. Read more...

By Thomas J. Snyder. Earlier this summer, the Department of Education proposed new regulations addressing the management of Title IV funds and the distribution of financial aid refunds. Read more...

By Michele Minter. Media pundits agree: college students are politically correct, infantile whiners who can’t tolerate discomfort regarding their values or sense of identity. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. You don’t hear much about the United States being a “postracial society” these days, except when someone is dismissing bygone illusions of the late ’00s, or just being sarcastic. With the Obama era beginning to wind down (as of this week, the president has just under 18 months left in office) American life is well into its post-post-racial phase. Read more...