What's worse than David Horowitz's brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.

The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books. Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, by Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. Since I often can't make time to review excellent books, I don't usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz's failed hit job.

At least the first book in this series,...

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals—bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.

Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday's

In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher-ed coverage and what passes for policy "thought" about academic labor. "The real crisis in American science education," the article concludes, "is a distorted job market's inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities." Bingo.

The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a "shortage" of U.S. scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an "oversupply" of persons with doctorates in science.

That doesn't make sense -- except when you understand that both camps are wrong.

There is no shortage of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers and there's no...

Slow dissolve: Manhattan, 15 years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street --  next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe -- to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.

I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.

Inspired by a California law that set 75...

A guest post by Henry Giroux
x-posted: truthout.org

In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high-school teacher, Howard's book, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high-school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard's working-class background. It...

Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them?

As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices -- Kindles, Nooks, etc. -- have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.)

Providing fast, inexpensive and even free access to many titles, portability, adjustable type, searchable text, and a growing list of other functions, these devices meet many readers' needs on both airplanes and nightstands. 

But these dedicated devices just aren't ready for the prime time of academic and professional use. Limitations and glitches in their annotation functions, difficulties with copying text, and even the need to mimic the paperback book experience present real issues for the scholar, student, lawyer, and...

The stark contrast between recent imaginative actions by students and the decades of poor data, bad analysis, and foot-dragging by most academic institutions suggests a possibility. Could AAUP and the disciplinary associations become the next target for the more radical students?

For today's grads, socially conscious unionism no longer represents the left wing of political possibility. Instead it's a launching pad from which they can surpass the limits to the imagination of a previous generation.

Take the AAUP. I believe we represent low-hanging fruit for the rising generation of students and contingent faculty. We are a democratic association with simple procedures. Occupying the slate with insurgent graduate student candidates can be accomplished using a simple petition process. A few thousand votes -- the graduate employees on two or three campuses -- could shape...

OK, let's imagine the impossible of total supply-side control. Clamp off admissions to every doctoral program in history immediately and what happens?

They all keep pumping out new Ph.D.'s at contemporary levels for 10 years. Scratch that. They actually pump out higher levels, because fewer of those enrolled will drop out, believing that they have better chances. So that keeps the "supply" at status quo rates for, say, 13 to 15 years. Then of course there's all the underemployed circling the drain. They're good for at least another five years' supply.

Another thing. Young people being so clever, they'll find ways around that job czar and the gerontocracy, enrolling -- as so many already do -- in American Studies, cultural studies, women's and ethnic studies. So while history is choking off "supply," the "competition" will continue merrily.

So even...

My piece questioning the supply-side bent to the American Historical Association's 2010 job report has gotten thoughtful replies by historiann, Alan Baumler, Jonathan Rees, Ellen Schrecker, Sandy Thatcher and others, both at my home blog and here at Brainstorm.

I really appreciate these thoughts, and want to emphasize how much I respect Townsend's work for AHA over the years, including his parsing of the data on many fronts-especially "privilege," which I believe informs his diss as well -- or I'd probably have come on a...

A funny thing happened on the way to the AHA this year -- American Historical Association staffer Robert B. Townsend issued his annual report on tenure-track employment in the field. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that holders of freshly minted doctorates face grim prospects. What raised my eyebrows -- and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor -- was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an "oversupply" of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control "the supply side of the market," i.e., "cut the number of students" in doctoral programs. 

This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a "second wave" of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan...