Workplace Blog

Times-Union: Claims of faculty bias are biased, study says

Do professors have a liberal bias?

Ask University at Albany’s College Republicans, and they’ll tell you about the student whose Iraq views led one professor to label him a “fascist” and “warmonger.”

Or you’ll hear about another professor who called Crawford, Texas — home of President Bush’s Western White House — a “dump.”

“We thought it might be this professor’s view that it’s a dump because there’s not a Starbucks there,” said College Republicans Chairman Matthew Rozea, only half-kidding.

The Washington Post: Howard Police Probe Apparent Suicide of Former ‘Top-Notch’ UMBC Professor

She was a former college professor who had lost almost everything — her stellar academic reputation, her financial well-being and her anonymity in the swanky suburban neighborhood where she was accused of working as a high-priced prostitute.

MRZine: Academia and Social Change

Academia and Social Change
by Matthew Richman

The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians. Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire for Modernity: Masculinity, Mexican Migration, and the Dynamics of U.S. National Belonging.” If academic work like this bears no relationship to concrete political realities, a group called Historians Against the War (HAW) injected some activism into the conference. Formed several months after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, HAW opposes “the expansion of United States empire and the doctrine of pre-emptive war that have led to the occupation of Iraq.” HAW proposed a resolution against the Iraq war, which passed after an hour of debate. The resolution enumerated the measures taken by the administration which are inimical to historians or historically-minded people, such as “condemning as ‘revisionism’ the search for truth about pre-war intelligence” and “re-classifying previously unclassified government documents.” With the passage of the statement, the AHA effectively endorsed its conclusions: that members of the AHA should “. . . take a public stand as citizens on behalf of the values necessary to the practice of our profession; and . . . do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.” The success of the resolution means that the AHA is, for the first time in its 123 year history, taking an anti-war stance. In 1969, a previous resolution, supported by some of the same historians as the 2007 one, was defeated.

The Chronicle: Survey of Junior Professors Shows Good Places to Work in Academe

Junior faculty members, generally, are a satisfied lot, according to the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education. But those at Brown University, Davidson College, Kenyon College, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia seem downright ecstatic about their jobs.