“It’s broadly recognized, certainly by contingent faculty themselves, that they really don’t possess academic freedom,” Cary Nelson says, at least not “in the way that the American academy has assumed for basically half a century that everyone who teaches does.”
In the first segment of our interview, the 49th president of the AAUP suggests that the shift to a majority contingent faculty is not only an economic phenomenon.
It’s an intellectual sea change as well–for the faculty and for their students.
Instead of intellectual freedom, many of the majority contingent faculty can be fired for contradicting the administration, can’t choose course texts or create syllabi, and are afraid to challenge students to think and learn, or raise controversial issues.
“It’s a question of teaching in a climate of fear, versus teaching in a climate of freedom and honest interchange with your students,” Nelson warns. “The American academy has shifted from a place where there is a great deal of reinforcement for the intellectual independence of its faculty, to a place where there is very little.”
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