Faculty Lounge

He may or may not get elected president, but Texas governor Rick Perry may wind up having more of a lasting influence on education than the last two occupants of the White House ever did.

Attempts by the U. S. Department of Education to tighten the reins on the Ivory Tower may already be backfiring on the very colleges and universities that welcomed the move.

Here are the highlights so far.

We have written on the academic ambivalence towards the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States here, here, and here. The actual memorial even brought outright denial from academe.

Academics love captive audiences, whether they find them on a college campus or within prison walls.

Academics salivate at the chance to put their pet theories into practice but when they actually are able to, they’re usually the last ones to recognize the unintended consequences of their schemes.

Chicago-based Roosevelt University, a school  that prides itself on “social justice” seems to have dispensed precious little of it to an adjunct professor it dismissed last year.

Then there are those professors who take the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States to vent their spleen about all that they see wanting in the U. S.

When journalists retire to academia, they often find a new audience there. Those new followers, though, can be just as easily misled as the old readers and viewers.

Washington Examiner columnist Noemie Emery, who writes some of the most thoughtful think pieces around, offered an interesting commentary on what cerebral folks like to call the Zeitgeist—loosely translated as spirit of the times.

Although its denizens and proprietors like to think of it as a bastion of reason, outsiders trying to wrest information out of the Ivory Tower, such as your servants at Accuracy in Academia, have rarely found it to be. It turns out that some who have worked within it feel roughly the same way.

In an interview in The Chronicle Review, a CUNY English prof gives more detail on his background than most readers care to know, but about as much as his students  have come to expect.