From the Editor

From the Editor: The Economy, Baseball Season, and Other Key Issues

The current economic crisis is hitting higher education where it hurts, and this issue features three reactions to the cuts in different states. Florida has experienced dramatic reductions in state funding for higher education, and Neil Jumonville fills us in on how his faculty union finds itself allied with the campus administration at Florida State University in opposition to a common foe—the Florida legislature.

From the Editor: Back to School

This back-to-school issue of Academe features a pair of lead articles on academic freedom, but not in the traditional sense. Robert O’Neil, from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, surveys the latest cases in which academic freedom has been challenged in online venues. John Buschman then explores the issue of academic freedom for librarians and longs for a body that would do for librarians what the AAUP does for faculty members.

From the Editor: Governance in a Time of Financial Crisis

Calls to resist the corporatization of higher education and for faculty control over educational issues go back at least to Thorstein Veblen’s publication of The Higher Learning in America in 1918. However, as many of the articles in this issue demonstrate, the current economic crisis has greatly intensified threats to the practice of shared governance.

From the Editor: The Art of Blowing Smoke and the Craft of Reporting

In the mid-1980s, I worked in a newsroom perched on the frigid plateau of Wyoming, where the snow, natives said, never melted. The wind just chased it around until it got all wore out. The managing editor had a libertarian streak married to a mischievous contrarian streak. We adored each other and argued over just about everything. We were as one only on the subject of the then U.S. representative from Wyoming, Dick Cheney.

From the Editor: The Conveyor Belt to Nowhere

Communications theorist James W. Carey noted that the world has always seemed on the verge of imploding. “The shadow of the Apocalypse is cast across all our sophisticated imaginings.”

Carey was too sophisticated and occasionally dark of mood himself to believe that the apocalypse was merely a minor demon that could be called forth for comfort, then dismissed.

From the Editor: What We Owe Students

Amazing sea-monkeys. X-ray specs. Invisible goldfish that remain invisible, absolutely as promised.

From the Editor: Assessment, Accountability, and Albatrosses

By the time you read this, in the Indian summer of our discontent, BP probably will have finished its static kill and relief wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

Eager students will certainly be headed back into classrooms at the University of California, Berkeley, now home to what is believed to be the largest public-private research consortium in the country. Only a tiny handful of those students may have access to the proprietary, private biofuel research labs of BP, leveraged by public money and located on a public university’s campus.

From the Guest Editor: The Entrepreneurial University

Universities are inescapably embedded in overlapping social and political contexts that at times work to their advantage and at other times to their disadvantage. Notwithstanding the “ivory-tower” image, many of these venerable institutions have had to struggle to balance their independence and the autonomy of their faculty to teach and engage in research with the requirements and restrictions that corporate sponsors and the federal government place on their funding.

From the Editor: Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

Even in the face of increasingly cataclysmic news for the humanities, and despite having two university degrees in underperforming esoterica—that is to say, French—I still feel defiant instead of resigned.

And yet. What a bloodied state we’re in.

From the Editor: Surviving Hurricanes 101

As we batten down the hatches, hunker down, and rethink all our priorities in public higher education, I’m reminded of the similarities of preparing for a hurricane in North Carolina: Water, check. Batteries, check. Bottles of decent wine, check.

And don’t forget the good media coverage. Sure, it sounds more superstructure than base. Less central to survival. And obviously, harder to come by, as I’m not counting the small army of reporters on wind-whipped beaches, wearing designer anoraks, shouting into their mikes, sea foam blowing into their faces.

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