This article uses a narrative retelling of my journey to academic development to offer a new insight into induction initiatives: alongside a critical commitment to student learning, new academic developers need to build an informed and scholarly 'idea of the university'. As universities renew focus on teaching and learning, student retention, and…

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…

In this article, Turcotte-Summers responds to Eamonn Callan's essay "Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces" (2016) with three main counterarguments. First, the correct response to the systemic oppressions faced by our students is not a more liberal but a more liberatory and radical education. Second, dignity safety is not a useful…

A recent article in "The Weekly Standard," "Kenyon College Cancels Play About Immigration; Starts 'Whiteness Group,'" describes a current call for censorship. Wendy MacLeod's play, "The Good Samaritan," is about an immigrant family in the U.S. surviving "without pay and living in dire conditions," according…

The following comments are intended as a constructive critique of the questions posed by Lima, Osterman and Rezende. The issues raised by the authors advocate for a return in research and teaching to the impetus of dialectical materialist approaches in the originators of the sociocultural school, including Vygotsky. The focus of this response is…

The present article is the fourth in an unintended series charting the author's experiences of academic censure via social exclusion, or "amicable exclusion" as the Vietnamese reprint has it (Jones, 2012, 2013, 2014). Here in talking about academic censure, Jones touches on former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Mason's (1990) excoriation by the…

In this commentary, James W. Fraser, a noted historian of education, cites examples from several teacher education programs at more than 30 universities partnering with the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowships in various ways. Additionally, Fraser reviews decades of challenges to traditional teacher preparation, looks at some current reforms, and…

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of "religion" and "world religions" and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach…

One of the major problems from which students suffer has to do with reading: reading with diligence, understanding, and, ideally, with the pleasure that attends discovery. Many students have long been hermeneutical-readers-of-a-sort. The problem has deep roots in a widely diffused media and technocyber environment that thins down and disperses the…

In this paper, the author begins by saying how privileged he feels to be included in the celebration of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ) and to toast forty years of American Indian studies at UCLA. He looks back over the field of Native American literature and criticism, then peeks at the present, and last, makes some…

This article interrogates the notion of "glocalization" (Moja, 2004, based on Castells, 2001) as a concept that seeks to integrate the local and the global to address both the need for social justice and the need to participate in a global market economy. The article argues that the relation between the global and the local cannot be…

There has been, and remains, much criticism of the external monitoring of the quality of universities' learning and teaching by bodies such as the QAA largely on the grounds that it is essentially a bureaucratic collection of data that does little, if anything, to help in improving or enhancing the learning and teaching. In this article, while…

Whatever their relative importance or determining priority, globalisation and virtualisation may be seen as just two constructed dimensions of a raft of interrelated changes taking place in contemporary culture. Those changes are both impacting on and expressed in higher education systems and universities throughout the world. The ways in which,…

Some critics believe Allan Bloom is wrong about many issues in "The Closing of the American Mind," which discusses failures in the contemporary university. The paper analyzes why the book is so popular, claiming Bloom is wrong about the history of the university, the sixties, race, class, and gender. (SM)

Critiques the mentoring paradigm in the hopes of enabling women to be more realistic about the dynamics of the power elements of mentoring. Proposes that this analysis will help create space for critiquing the norms, practices, and definitions of success that are at the heart of institutions. (GCP)