university

  • From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good

    From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good

    The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.

  • Imbalance of Power

    In a powerful essay at The Toast, Katie Rose Guest Pryal shares her story of fearing being kicked out of her graduate program after rejecting her professor’s sexual advances: I was truly terrified—all of my hard work and all of my…

  • The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Taking Comfort in Futurama

    The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Taking Comfort in Futurama

    I’m a comfort watcher… I retreat into the worlds I know well, with characters that are friends, with outcomes I already understand.

  • GOP Candidate Would Censor Free Speech at Universities

    Tenured professors might soon be a thing of the past, and that could prove particularly frightening if one Republican presidential candidate gets a hold of the Department of Education. Tenure protections were created in order to foster original thinking on…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Sean Bernard

    The Rumpus Interview with Sean Bernard

    Sean Bernard talks about the placid, annoying heaven of his debut novel, Studies in the Hereafter, why he’s both optimistic and cynical about human nature, and the difference between writing short stories and a novel.

  • The Adjunct Crisis

    Nearly a third of all adjunct college faculty live below the poverty line. But its not just low pay that make these jobs miserable: lack of job security, long hours, and the expectation of filling roles that were once tenured,…

  • Profits Over Integrity

    Universities have spent the last several decades expanding the number of adjunct professors they hire, reducing full-time faculty and paying pauper’s wages to these part-time employees. Samuel Hazo explains how cutting full-time faculty is a disservice to academics in the…

  • The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother

    The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother

    “That’s the anthem I would have sung at my original graduation if the university had stayed open,” my mother said.

  • Part-Time Faculty Are Poor

    Writers expecting to supplement their art by teaching college level courses might need to find a new day job. A quarter of all part-time college faculty receive some sort of public assistance, reports Slate. Those numbers include Medicaid and nutrition…

  • Professors Are the Canary in the Coal Mine

    Though plenty of adjunct professors still teach students, the full-time, tenured, middle-class professor position is nearing extinction. Adjunct professors are paid at wages below the poverty line while the costs of the career—attending conferences, performing research, accessing academic databases—continue to rise. Sarah…

  • Adjunct Faculty Plan Walk Out

    Adjunct college faculty are at last taking a stand against abominable work conditions and low pay by planning a national walk out on February 25, 2015. Unlike their tenured counterparts, adjuncts lack protection from retributive firing should they follow through.…

  • Bookless Libraries

    Florida Polytechnic University has just opened, in a building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, a completely bookless library. Available to all the students is a catalog of 135,000 e-books that can be consulted in an impressive, completely empty room…