In this consideration of the current crisis in the American academy, the author focuses first on the passing of a generation of progressive faculty leaders and the urgent need to ensure that their places be filled. Second, he examines constructive strategies generated in response to the drop in black undergraduate enrollment at the University of California, Los Angeles, his home institution. The effectiveness of such strategies, he argues, depends largely on a commitment to building partnerships and alliances among communities both on and off campus. Third, the author touches on the extent to which contemporary debates over the state of the academy, and of higher education more generally, can involve fundamentally conflicting social values. (RY)

Evaluating new forms of scholarship for tenure and promotion requires taking those forms, and the methods of peer review they bring with them, on their own terms. Even more, it requires exercising the critical judgment on which our profession relies instead of outsourcing that judgment to others. Such evaluation requires reading both the work and the available evidence of the ways that scholars have responded to that work. (KF)