Antiquitopia

I just finished reading The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, who is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. I read this because the chair of my department has asked the entire department to read it, but I would recommend it to all humanities professors or professors to be. And while it focuses on the humanities, many of the observations affect the future of the university world as a whole. Unlike similar books, Donoghue takes a long perspective. Most books speak of a crisis in higher education beginning in the 80s, perhaps the 70s in the clash between corporate business values and the values of the university. He claims, instead, that this tension has been around for over a century, at least since the rise of monopolistic capitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this is not just a book about corporate values of competition and the bottom line versus the last bastion of pro...

Baylor is making headlines (well...at least in the Chronicle for Higher Education) due to its recent firing of its president. See the Chronicle article here . Much of the difficulty appears to be a shift in goals that have affected the tenure process. The Baptist university is trying to become a top research institution, while maintaining its Christian character. In the process, it seems that some priorities in the hiring and tenure process have shifted, and 12 out of 30 tenure bids were denied this year. 10 of these appealed the decision, with 7 reversals. Forbidden Gospels has talked about this recently (since she is geographically closer to Baylor), and has suggested two things: to become a top tier research university, 1) Baylor must secularize and 2) it must reward research above teaching in the tenure process. She suggests that the resistance is due to the conflict of becoming a top-tier research institution and maintaining their faith identity. In response, Rebecca Les...