In this article, the authors share their views on the article by Dr. Radford, which raises a number of key issues that have a great impact on the future of postgraduate training and funding as well as on postgraduate students' future careers. The first issue relates to higher education in which the teaching at undergraduate level is evermore being…

The authors maintain that higher education has tamely responded to pillory by political conservatives. This essay advocates for Michael Berube's defense of liberalism in higher education, "What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education." The writers also counter what they view as conservative attacks on…

M. Karen Powers and Catherine Chaput's ""Anti-American Studies" in the Deep South: Dissenting Rhetorics, the Practice of Democracy, and Academic Freedom in Wartime Universities" begins a much needed discussion about the current and ongoing assaults against academic freedom in American universities, which have not received…

In this article, the author comments on John Radford's article "Psychology in its Place," which is a provocative and thoughtful piece on the state of psychology as a discipline in higher education. In his article, Radford introduces evidence that psychology graduates are attractive to employers for their numeracy and literacy skills and…

Women in higher education and the consumer pressures they feel have implications for the quality of an education a woman receives. With college tuition rising, more and more college students are going into deeper financial debt than ever before (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2008). Popular culture influences on the college-going…

I suggest that, in universities, we often use the word "understanding" when we mean "overstanding". This is connected to relying on limited approaches to reading, ones that are forgetful of religious ways of reading. I offer a critical retrieval of religious ways of reading, practised in the past, and suggest how they might be included in the…

An article this author wrote about avatar harassment and assault in Second Life (SL) inspired a considerable response after it was published. Perhaps the most notable reply was from Linden Lab, the company that created the virtual-reality world. In his initial essay ("The Chronicle of Higher Education," September 14, 2007; "The Education Digest,"…

The polemical stance of Greville Rumble's paper argues for a "morality of humanity" that would produce a redistribution of material wealth, thus enabling (among other things) free use at point of access for higher education--and distance higher education in particular. The implicit assumption of this moral argument is that allowing such…

This article, as a response to two papers, identifies five critical issues and themes related to the teaching of evidence-based practice (EBP) in social work higher education. These five themes are: defining EBP; modeling the complexity of EBP in teaching; examining social work curriculum; coordinating social work professional organizations; and…

Examines the view that readers read different texts and create the text they read. Argues that (1) this view is a form of conceptual relativism; (2) the view is incoherent; and (3) work on radical interpretation offers a much more satisfactory account of why interpretations of texts differ so radically and better explains the value of studying…

Discusses how the best of autobiographies about the sick enrich the genre, with references to John Hull's "Touching the Rock," Andre Dubus's "Broken Vessels," Jacquie Gordon's "Give Me One Wish," and Robert Murphy's "The Body Silent," among others. Suggests that the reader's attempt to understand his or her own wounds motivates the reading of…

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers' responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies' tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more…

Argues that some of the works of major British writers may be read as propounding simple but important views on metaphysics of the self. Contends that the work of the British Empiricists cut the ground out from under the metaphysics of Descartes, and the world subsequently came to be regarded as a flux of impressions. Reflects on the relationship…

Discusses how reader response techniques, by bringing students together into interpretive communities, encourage students' real interactions with literary texts, and foster greater awareness of audience. (SR)

Argues that Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" should be read in its entirety, and that it should be considered a classic text for its continuing impact on the minds of readers from 1845 to the present. Cites incidents in which college students have marveled at Douglass's prose, and how…