items tagged with interview

We're pleased to offer you another interview with the contributors to Stephen Aby's forthcoming The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook.  Previous installments have included interviews with Aby and with Lawrence Poston.  In this edition, we had the privilege of chatting with contributor Kevin Mattson about the role of the college professor, the on-going threats to academic freedom, and "postmodern conservatism."  We hope you'll enjoy the interview as much as we enjoyed conducting it!

Later this month a new collection of essays entitled The Academic Bill of Rights Debate: A Handbook (Praeger) will be released.  The book, edited by University of Akron professor, Stephen Aby, is a comprehensive look at the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to get legislation enacted to allegedly bring a "balance" of perspectives to college classrooms and campuses.  We got a chance to ask Stephen Aby a few questions about the genesis of the collection and some of his thoughts on the whole "academic bill of rights" (ABOR) movement. Below the jump, you can read the whole interview, but we can't help but whet your appetite with this comment from Aby about the book's contents:

I can't help but note that David Horowitz has five unedited pieces reproduced in this volume, for which he granted permission.  And there are many other pieces sympathetic to his views that are annotated in the bibliography.  Ironically, one would be hard pressed to find that diversity of views in his last two books.

We hope you enjoy the full interview.

Free Exchange got a chance to talk with Perlstein about the essay, his views on college, and how he sees the current debates about politics and supposed "liberal bias" on campus. 

Free Exchange:  What led you to write "What's the Matter with College?" 

Perlstein:  It wasn't an idea I dreamed up out of my head--the New York Times Magazine came to me, explaining that they were doing a special issue on college, and wanted an essay comparing the college experience today to the college experience in the 1960s. But the assignment chimed a deep cord in me. I live in a college neighborhood (my wife is a Ph.D. student) and am always seeking out interesting undergrads to spend time with, simply because I find those transition years a fascinating time of life. My intuition that college ain't what it used to be predates my work on the essay, and comes from my surprise at how alienated my most intellectually adventurous friends seemed from the University of Chicago experience. I naturally contrasted this to my own recollections at the same school in the late 1980s and early '90s, and also my historical research on college in the 1960s.

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.