CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Despite Fears about Trigger Warnings, Survey Suggests Few Faculty Are Forced to Use Them

Very few college professors are forced to use trigger warnings in class, according to an online survey of CAA and MLA members. Out of 808 who responded, less than 1 percent said their college or university had adopted a trigger-warning policy. Eighty-five percent said in the survey that students had never asked them to use trigger warnings, and 93 percent did not know of any student-initiated efforts at their school to require them in class. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

The Hostile Renegotiation of the Professor-Student Relationship

There is a scourge on college campuses today, driving a wedge between students and faculty. Political correctness? Maybe that, too. But I’m referring instead to the newly triumphant caricature of today’s undergrad (and perhaps some grad students as well) as a hypersensitive, helicoptered student-customer who will file a Title IX complaint if the dining hall kale isn’t organic. Today’s undergrad is so entitled as to demand to be employable after graduation. (Read more from the New Republic.)

Why State Lawmakers Must Support Tenure at Public Universities

Critics dismiss tenure as “a job for life.” Tenure, however, is not about protecting people but rather about protecting open conversation and debate. It is about academic freedom—the ability to research and teach on all topics, without fear of reprisal. Public universities, as state-chartered institutions, may be particularly prone to intervention when faculty members express politically unpopular ideas. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Fake Painting

Noah Charney, the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the author of the novel The Art Thief, spoke to the New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris about his new book, The Art of Forgery. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)

Why Are There Still So Few Successful Female Artists?

What will it take to finally put an end to sexism in art? Things are a lot better than in the mid-1980s, when the Guerrilla Girls formed to picket a Museum of Modern Art survey that contained just 13 women in a show of 169 artists. But they are still not great: of all artists represented by galleries in the US today, just 30 percent are female, according to the stats from Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally project. And that total seems to have been stuck more or less in place for some time. (Read more from Artnet News.)

How a New Librarian of Congress Could Improve US Copyright

The Librarian of Congress has a somewhat strange position. He or she both runs the world’s largest library—which has a staff in the thousands and a collection in the millions—and oversees the Copyright Office, the government office that manages the register of all copyrighted materials. So when the current Librarian of Congress, James Billington, announced plans to retire, it wasn’t only librarians who perked up. Copyright advocates did so too, because of the librarian’s incredible power. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Historian Uses Lasers to Unlock Mysteries of Gothic Cathedrals

Thirteen million people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris every year, entering through massive wooden doors at the base of towers as solidly planted as mountains. They stand in front of walls filigreed with stained glass and gaze at a ceiling supported by delicate ribs of stone. If its beauty and magnificence is instantly apparent, so much about Notre Dame is not. To begin with, we don’t know who built this cathedral—or how. (Read more from National Geographic.)

A Realistic Summer Writing Schedule

The grueling grading period is over. The semester is finally finished. You’ve probably taken a few well-deserved weeks off, but now it’s time to start working on your own research and writing projects. Many of us use our precious summer “vacation” to churn out articles and book chapters. But as the tenure-track market tightens and pressure to publish increases, many people—especially junior faculty—feel intense anxiety over their summer writing schedules. (Read more from Vitae.)