items tagged with Lawrence Poston

Following up on our interview with Steve Aby, editor of The Academic Bill of Rights: A Handbook, we got a chance to talk with a few of the contributors to the collection.  We begin our series of interviews with Lawrence Poston, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago, whose essay in the book is entitled "'The More Things Change'?: Academic Freedom Then and Now" which (obviously) looks at the history of academic freedom.  When we asked him about the current debates around academic freedom, Poston contextualized the current ideological debates within the economics of higher education that most Americans face.

In Illinois, at least, what gets the presses rolling tend to be issues of undergraduate education (e.g., why does my kid at the flagship institution have to sit in an introductory course in psychology with 800 students and never have access to a professor, only a TA?)   Then the time is ripe for extremists with their own political agenda to move in and say, "And look how those professors spend the rest of their time," so that political issues come in on the coat-tails of economic ones.

Read these and other interesting observations in the full interview with Professor Poston below the jump.