Twilight of Academic Freedom

Cary Nelson describes how the shift to a majority contingent faculty is an intellectual sea change for undergraduates as well as faculty themselves.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Colleges
• universities
• professors
• students
• adjuncts
• faculty
• academic freedom
• AAUP
• PhD
• Marc Bousquet

[Frenchdoc9740]

What a great video. Cary Nelson exactly epitomizes what he talks about here. He shows us what it means to be an intellectual, to have well-reasoned arguments, to have thought through a position and to have stuff to back it up.

[PrometheusWithLight]

Ah, unfortunate.

See, what happens is, a simple few have rouined academic freedom for the others.

Case in point, the intelligent design movement. The entire movement was founded to undermine science (I'm not joking; google the "Wedge Document.") These people tried abusing academic freedom in a failed attempt to teach creationism as science; a few pseudointellectuals have, I'm quite sad to say, ruined it for the res tof us.

[lovelplants]

uh nice.. well i agree for academic freedom...

[dzsquared1]

Academic freedom is another way of saying "Just keep paying us and we'll do whatever we want".

Let's face it-"Intellectuals" are not diety; they should be held accountable for their performance just like everyone else.  Their job is teach their subject, not indoctrinate the students to leftist philosophy.

[Killedkennyagain]

@engineerjatt You exaggerate, but the good ones definitely do not get paid enough for the value they provide, especially compared to the coaches of the colleges sports team, which in many cases is 3 or 4 times that of Professors.

[perfectbark]

You would think that college administrators are embarrassed ....... but they are not.

[mlabit1985]

@Frenchdoc9740

'Stuff', I believe here is not the type of nomenclature that 'we' should be using. In fact, I just saw a Progressive video sponsored by OSI and the TIDES foundation through activist investors like George Soros, you might have heard of em' (he's kinda a big deal, and an elitist arrogant son-of-a-gun like this chap), that, huh, huh, ~let me catch my breath~ ... says 'stuff' is bad ! AHHHHHH scary, 'stuff' and look out for the bearded marxists, If you can go around avoiding mirr

[nw316]

For faculty to display that for students to understand what it means to be an intellectual the faculty needs to display controversial points of view and in so doing warrant guaranteed salaries... ok, let's try that in the medical field or in law enforcement.

[nw316]

It sounds to me like job security is the real concern in this interview... not exactly inspiring. So, do students deserve the same freedom when disagreeing with faculty? I know plenty who get lowered grades (ultimately career security) if they disagree with their professors, no matter how perfectly stated in reasoned defense.

[ColbertandStewartpwn]

"high school diploma holders earn better wages working on burger king.... "

Really? That's kind of the problem here...

[prschuster]

When you (PrometheusWithLight) mention how the Intelligent Design Movement hi-jacked the notion of academic freedom, I immediately thought of Ben Stein in "Expelled". Politics is becoming a world of post-modern word games.