“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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This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Precarity, academic freedom, academic labor system, administrators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] in contexts where faculty are free to devise their own grading schemes–a situation which isn’t universal!–different faculty teaching the same course, or in the same area, might well emphasize […]
The faculty opposition to (instead of the faculty “take-over” and management of) formal assessment in academia seems in large part due to an “independent contractor”-only approach to academic freedom.
When “the faculty” returns to its collective identity and attendant responsibilities, the “transparency” which the public is clamoring for will appear less problematic and, indeed, an opportunity for those in the professions (AND the arts and sciences)within the professoriate at all ranks to actually control and strengthen their individual academic freedom and resist administrative intrusion(cf. also the comments at the cross-posting on CHE’s Brainstorm).
“Solidarnosc”, as it were….
When “the faculty”, “collective”….
“That may take long….”
- Jean Anouilh, “Becket”