In what is being hailed as a revolutionary solution to the overpopulation problem of adjuncts in higher education, the Bench Foundation has announced a multi-year program called Aid-for-Adjuncts. The program is the result of a ten-year study of the rapid proliferation of part-time instructors in college, university, and seminary classrooms. For the first time, administrative centers will be established across America, helping school officials formulate proper guidelines for the use and abuse of adjuncts. Continue Reading »
When I started graduate school in English in the early 90s, I thought that a certificate in Women’s Studies would widen my training and help my career. My university happened to have a famous professor in the field, a pioneer in academic feminism who had created one of the first graduate degree programs in Women’s Studies. A tough, learned woman with exacting standards, she did not suffer fools or histrionic students lightly. She was also a conservative. Continue Reading »
In 1997 Avery Dulles was asked by Commonweal magazine to respond to a disputed question: “How Catholic is the Catholic Theological Society of America?” The impetus was Cardinal Bernard Law’s charge that the CTSA, the largest and most prestigious association of Catholic theologians in the United States, had become little more than a “wasteland” of dissent against official Church teachings. Continue Reading »
Sound like fun? Maybe they’ll talk about “alterity” also! KC Johnson at Minding the Campus (H/T Instapundit) takes a look at the program for the 2013 American Historical Association conference, especially at the priceless paper titles . Did you know that 1945-1965 “saw the . . . . Continue Reading »
To continue where we left off in Songbook #14, rock intellectualizing not only involves dismissal of the musically fine, but also of intellectually fine. It’s very activity demonstrates its ambivalence toward the core activity of the life of the mind, the wrestling with thinkers of first rank. . . . . Continue Reading »
The source of the advertisement above is not P. G. Wodehouse, nor Anthony Trollope, nor even Mark Pattison. It appeared in the Cambridge University Reporter—in 1973. The eleven essays assembled by George Marsden and Bradley Longfield on the demise of university patronage of religion in . . . . Continue Reading »
The Question of Anti-Semitism I enjoyed very much reading the editorial “Jews, Christians, and Anti-Semitism” (March), imbued as it is with a generosity of spirit and deep faith . . . . I appreciated the clarifying statement that to care about Jews and Judaism is to care about Israel. . . . . Continue Reading »
In her lively new study based upon fourteen schools of education across the country, Rita Kramer skewers two quite distinct forms of folly. One form of folly is the attempt by a few of the faculty whose classes she observed to make the classes occasions for political indoctrination so . . . . Continue Reading »
Last year a national committee of Presbyterians composed a statement on sexuality called “Keeping Body and Soul Together.” The document evidenced characteristics increasingly distinctive of the productions of American church bureaucracies: a cute journalistic title, a manifesto-like rhetorical . . . . Continue Reading »
