AAUP Names New Academe Editor

The AAUP has named Cat Warren, an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, as editor of Academe. She will replace Paula Krebs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. The Academe editor retains his or her faculty position while also working with AAUP staff members to produce the magazine.

“This is a huge challenge, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun,” Warren says. “Things are a bit rough out there in higher education, but I think that the AAUP and Academe have a critical role to play in defining and defending higher education dedicated to the public good.”

Before returning to academe to get her PhD in 1990, Cat Warren was a reporter for several newspapers across the United States, including the Hartford Courant. In 1995, she joined the faculty at North Carolina State, where she has taught a wide range of courses in journalism and media and in gender studies. She publishes in journalistic venues as well as in academic ones—on media criticism, cultural studies, and issues in higher education.

“Cat Warren comes to the Academe editorship after extraordinarily successful service as head of the North Carolina conference of AAUP chapters. A journalist before becoming a college professor, she is media savvy and dedicated both to enhancing Academe’s online presence and to promoting investigative reporting,” says AAUP president Cary Nelson.

Warren’s history with the AAUP started in 2004, when she was researching neoconservative attacks on academe and realized that the AAUP was one of the only organizations that was both speaking out on the issue and working to protect affected faculty. Since that time, she has served as president of the North Carolina conference of the AAUP, as vice chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences, and on the AAUP’s national committees on governance and on teaching, research, and publication.

In addition to her teaching, reporting, and AAUP activities, Warren served as director of communications for the Common Sense Foundation, a North Carolina social justice organization.

Warren’s long-term plans include bringing original investigative journalism projects on national topics into the magazine and creating a new interactive Web presence for Academe.

To facilitate such changes, Cary Nelson recently appointed several new members to the Academe advisory board, including Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of the Nation. Navasky is also director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University and a regular commentator on the public-radio program Marketplace.  Other new advisory board members are Marc Bousquet of Santa Clara University, who is a member of the AAUP’s national Council and a blogger and commentator on academic labor issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Laura Perna, an associate professor and sociologist of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. Ellen Schrecker and Noreen O’Connor will continue as board members.

Krebs, who finished her term in September, was editor for four years. “Paula’s service was thoughtful and unfailingly efficient,” says Nelson. “If you read Academe over those years, you would find yourself well informed about all the most pressing issues in higher education and challenged to think about them in new ways.”

“I loved my time on Academe,” Krebs says. In addition to continuing her teaching duties, she will be working on the Summer Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies, a program that aims to increase diversity in doctoral programs in English.