Let’s beef up US post-tenure review – especially for football coaches
If we tenured professors do not hold ourselves to agreed standards, we will find ourselves being refereed by demagogues, says Robert Zaretsky
If we tenured professors do not hold ourselves to agreed standards, we will find ourselves being refereed by demagogues, says Robert Zaretsky
As precarity affects ever more academics for ever longer, many have come to see a permanent position as the gateway to professional happiness. But does it always work out that way? Or do the...
Perhaps it is only by recasting an agreement as an adventure that professors can respond to the urgency of our times, says Robert Zaretsky
Some students have abused privacy allowances and marking latitude – but others’ ongoing engagement has been heartening, says Robert Zaretsky
A strategic rejection of digital instruction is akin to France’s short-sighted attempt to prevent invasion in the 1930s, says Robert Zaretsky
Video conferencing is a reasonable substitute for lectures, but that is where it must end, say Robert Zaretsky and George Alliger
Pointless meetings, fraught commutes and whiffy shared fridges are mercifully off limits during the coronavirus lockdown. But what else are faculty glad to be rid of? And what are they pining to...
Robert Zaretsky is troubled by his students’ refusal to see any nuance in a historical text that contains racial slurs
Academics’ deep identification with their work means that the failure of a book proposal, grant application or promotion request can cut deeply. But in a competitive profession, such knock-backs are...
As summer approaches in the northern hemisphere, six academics give their personal guides to their favourite vacation destinations
Six scholars learn the career and life lessons of their greatest academic missteps
Determination to make your own way is key to success in academia, but scholars’ research, teaching and even their lives can be transformed by a chance encounter or event
While the Sorbonne was at the epicentre of the 1968 protests, the shock waves were felt far beyond France, with students occupying Peking and UC Berkeley at the same time. A group of academics...
The French thinker Simone Weil’s focus on teaching students to attend to reality is crucial in the social media age, writes Robert Zaretsky
US scholars' tendency to award extra credit for attending non-core lectures hastens the academy's slide into transactionalism, says Robert Zaretsky