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Experimenting with Higher Education (updated)

A new university is being created by a group of academics and media personalities who, unlike you and your university, care about the truth: (more…)

Complementing Defenses of Academic Freedom with Understanding & Advice

As reported earlier this week, there’s a new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), that aims to defend faculty whose academic freedom is being threatened. (more…)

Academic Freedom Alliance Formed

A group of scholars have created a new non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the academic freedom of higher education faculty (more…)

University of South Carolina Announces Plan to Restart In-Person Classes the Fall

Yesterday, my school, the University of South Carolina, announced it is planning to restart in-person teaching this fall. This seems like a good move. (more…)

Game of Thrones Quotes for Academic Contexts

Game of Thrones, a well-acted and beautifully filmed sprawling television fantasy of political ambition, royal lineage, revenge, zombies, surprising deaths, random magic, and dragons—entertaining and big but also silly and superficial—is ending tonight. People can’t stop talking about it.

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American Philosophical Association and Other Groups Protest Brazilian Academic Defunding Proposal

The American Philosophical Association (APA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Associação Nacional de Pós-Gradiação em Filosofia (Brazil), and several other academic organizations have published a letter protesting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s proposed defunding of philosophy and sociology in his country’s institutions of higher education. (..

Open Letter Regarding President Bolsonaro’s Recent Pronouncements on Defunding Philosophy and Sociology (updated)

(UPDATE (5/5/19): I’m bringing this post back up to the top of the main page to increase its visibility. The letter now has over 3,000 signatures. Academics in all disciplines are encouraged to sign.)

Below is a letter responding to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent declarations that he is considering a plan to withdraw funding for the study and teachin..

Media Reports on Campus Free Speech “Out of Kilter with Reality”

“The press accounts of widespread suppression of free speech are clearly out of kilter with reality,” says a new report on free speech at universities by the UK Parliament. “Any inhibition on lawful free speech is serious, and there have been such incursions, but we did not find the wholesale censorship of debate in universities which media coverage has suggested.” ..

Professors Dating Students, Professors Harassing Students

“As for the fact of being a lecturer in bed with undergraduates in particular, there was no possibility of avoiding the charge that this was an abuse of my position.”

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Against Letters of Recommendation for Academic Jobs (updated)

“The practice of soliciting letters of recommendation for academic positions is both foolish and immoral.” (more…)

Response From A Conservative (guest post by Philippe Lemoine)

The following is a guest post * by Philippe Lemoine, a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell University. It’s a response to a post by Les Green (Oxford) published here yesterday, “Because They Are Universities” (originally published at Green’s blog under the title “Why it is hard to be a campus conservative“). Lemoine’s response, below, was first published at his..

Because They Are Universities

The following is a guest post * by Leslie Green, Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College at Oxford University. It was originally published at his blog, Semper Viridis under the title “Why it is hard to be a campus conservative.”

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What Kinds of Universities Lack Philosophy Departments? Some Data (guest post by Eric Schwitzgebel)

The following is a guest post * by Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California, Riverside) that gathers data about the kinds of colleges and universities in the United States that have or lack philosophy departments and a philosophy major program. A version of this post was originally published at his blog, The Splintered Mind.

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2017 QS Philosophy Rankings Released

London-based education firm Quacquarelli Symonds has published its annual “QS World University Rankings,” The Guardian reports, including a ranking of universities at which to study philosophy. (more…)

Your Discipline Versus Your University?

An increasing number of academics simply adopt what Albert Hirschmann would call an “exit” strategy—they care more for their discipline or, more to the point, their research network than the university that employs their labour and affirms their status.

So says sociologist Steve Fuller (Warwick) in a brief interview published at Social Epistemology Review and R..

Modern Universities Have Always Had Safe Spaces

…Academic freedom is the core meaning, the core institutional life, of freedom of debate and freedom of inquiry in the university setting. And one thing that’s notable about academic freedom as I’ve just labeled it is that it creates safe spaces. The people who are doing the work on an ongoing basis be they students, teachers, or researchers, don’t have to spend a..

Philosophy in the University: A Defense

“Far from being years of ‘enduring failure,’ the last 150 years have been philosophy’s best.”

So argues Scott Soames (University of Southern California) in an essay on the influence of academic philosophy in The New York Times column, The Stone. Framed as a response to “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (University of North Texas), ..

The Purification of Philosophy

institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.

So argue Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (both of University of North Texas). Philosophy’s institutionalization in the modern research university was a kind of “pu..

The Philosophy of Philosophical Institutions

Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle (both of the University of North Texas) have published an essay, “Socrates Untenured,” at Inside Higher Ed that makes a case for what they call “field philosophy” — a “context-driven, problem-focused, and interdisciplinary” approach. Their hope is that “a new philosophical practice, where philosophers work in real time with a variet..

Government Attempts to Interfere in Universities in Macedonia

Students and faculty in Macedonia have been protesting attempts by the government there to impose state-supervised exams for university graduates. Response to faculty involvement in the protests has been to propose a requirement that the government’s ministry of education approve the composition of thesis committees and be involved in thesis defenses.

Todd May (Cle..