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The English department at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, has announced that all syllabuses will note that the university is built on land that belonged to Native Canadian groups. The statement will say: “We acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of ‎ the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples.” A statement from the department chair, Ute Lischke, said, “In many of our classes at Laurier we critique power dynamics and including this acknowledgement on our course outlines certainly helps to raise students’ awareness about the continuing nature of colonialism. Read more...

The Association of American Universities, a group of the nation’s leading research institutions, on Monday criticized an inquiry by the U.S. House science committee into specific National Science Foundation grants. The panel, led by Republican Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, has been requesting information from the NSF about specific grants the agency awarded through its peer review process. Smith has long criticized some NSF research grants as an example of unnecessary or wasteful government spending. Earlier this year, he led efforts in the House to pass new restrictions on how the NSF could fund social science research, a singling out of that discipline that was widely criticized among academic researchers.  It also drew a rare critique by the National Science Board. Read more...

Faculty members at Dartmouth College voted, 116-13, Monday to ban the college's fraternities and sororities and to abolish the Greek system.
Similar votes have taken place before and had no effect, but the past year has been marked by increasing anti-Greek sentiment on campus. Responding to a poll in August, hundreds of students, faculty, staff, and alumni said they would like to see the college's Greek system abolished. Read more...

By Arica Lubin. Are you interested in forging a career path that may be off the so-called beaten path? Do you wonder what success looks like on this path and what principles have guided these career trailblazers? Read on. Read more...

By Christopher Garland. About this time last year, I celebrated my seventh year of living in the United States. To be clear, “celebrated” is probably much too generous a term for that particular moment, in part because it was also the fifth year of my Ph.D. and my first year on the job market. As much as I have come to think of the United States as my permanent residence, I was facing a reality that I preferred to ignore if at all possible. I was a Ph.D. student, in English, in 2013. While I had attempted to tick all the boxes that I could in order to be the best possible candidate, the statistics weren’t exactly encouraging. Read more...

By Rob Weir. If your school is anything like mine, there’s constant buzz (pressure?) about how to get out the word about all the wonderful things that happen on campus. Professors are increasingly asked make themselves “available” to the public, take part in “outreach” efforts, or become “public intellectuals.” What far too few administrations or news offices do is provide much training on how to engage media outlets effectively. Read more...

By Jason D. Seacat. Is it appropriate for academics to cross the boundary between conducting research and engaging in advocacy on the basis of their empirical findings? For the first time in my career, I have really begun grappling with this question. This summer marked the greatest amount of attention paid to any research project I have conducted. The Journal of Health Psychology published my project, titled “A Daily Diary Assessment of Female Weight Stigmatization.” Read more...

By Jeffrey Alan Johnson. “Why do we have such trouble telling faculty what they are going to do?” said the self-identified administrator, hastening to add that he “still thinks of himself as part of the faculty.”
“They are our employees, after all. They should be doing what we tell them to do.” Read more...

By Erik Esckilsen. Autumn in an election year is my favorite time to teach college rhetoric. I’ve yet to find a more potent text on the subject than the modern American political campaign. But my excitement about grappling with what candidates are saying and how they’re saying it also puts me under some pressure. As a teacher whose students are entering their first semester of college (excepting a few transfers), I feel a heightened sense of obligation to help them “read” the campaigns closely and critically -- and to apply their learning at the polls, most of them for the first time. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. The tension between promoting innovation and new approaches on the one hand and protecting academic quality and federal financial aid funds on the other is at the core of many major issues in higher education -- not the least of which is the accreditation system. The system of peer-reviewed quality assurance is frequently attacked as a brake on progress and competition in American higher education, even as others criticize it for going too soft on institutions in ways that cost taxpayers money. Read more...