This article is a reflection of the author's experiences teaching a course titled 'Women In Islam' [WIS] in an English Department at a medium, public, Masters granting, Liberal Arts university in the Midwestern United States. This paper argues for the importance of teaching WIS through a multi-genre, interdisciplinary, and global approach. The…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

Larry Lesser is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Texas at El Paso. He is also a UTEP Distinguished Teaching Professor whose awards include a 2016 Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award, the 2012 International Sun Conference Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award, a 2011 UT System Regents' Outstanding…

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the past president of the International Society for Infant Studies, served as the Associate Editor of "Child Development" and is on the governing counsel of the…

This comment is in response to Andrew D. Colgan's article in a previous issue of the journal. While the author finds Colgan's institutional analysis compelling and agrees his proposed "deinstitutionalizing solutions" of reviving teacher culture and return teacher education preparation to teachers' colleges. He proposes a third remedy,…

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of…

Gert J. J. Biesta is a widely known and respected scholar in the field of education. He has published a large number of articles, books, chapters and other work. He is currently professor of Education in the Department of Education at Brunel University London. This interview with Biesta touched on a wide range of topics. This article is a…

Most collegiate departments where one can find Spanish, French, German, and other non-English disciplines are referred to as "language departments," either formally or informally. Such designations are interesting as they suggest to the outsider (i.e., non-language person) that these departments consist of experts in language. In this…

The purpose of this essay is to offer a survey of religious studies capstones from twenty-nine U.S. colleges and universities, to identify the most common frustrations about the capstone, and to observe how departments resolve such frustrations. I conclude that the most successful capstones--in terms of students' performance and faculty…

This article offers a transcript of author Allan Rossman's interview with Jessica Utts, Professor and Chair of Statistics at the University of California-Irvine. Utts is also a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a recipient of a Founders Award from ASA. Additionally, she has been elected as President of ASA for the year 2016. The…

Issue 13:3 of this journal (July 2010) included a "Conversation" on Hugh Heclo's recent publication "On Thinking Institutionally" (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) with a book review by Robert Fennell and responses by Richard Ascough, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Michael McLain, and Lynne Westfield. Here we publish two additional responses to this same book.…

Like many liberal-arts institutions, Middlebury College, where the author teaches, has a problem: Too many students want to be economics majors. Economics enrollments keep growing, and adding more faculty members to the department seems to only increase the demand. Professors at other liberal-arts colleges confirm that the phenomenon is widespread…

As part of the development of a Department of Writing Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, the 99-year-old Department of Rhetoric in the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences was dismantled. The bulk of Rhetoric faculty have been shifted to this new department of Writing Studies. The…

Even by the standards of higher education, presidential search committees are odd concoctions, combining the dynamics of the governing board, the faculty, the administration and staff, and the students in an environment that is, at best, unusual and, at worst, adversarial. Ultimately, however, that committee's work is vital to the future of the…

Last spring, the author distributed a survey to majors and minors in Hispanic studies at Connecticut College and at other schools to informally gather student attitudes toward the nature of Hispanic-studies courses as it pertained to their interests and goals. Although results were somewhat predictable, an unexpected finding was that of 148…