BY MATTHEW BOEDY In Georgia we decided to conduct a small survey of faculty opinions about shared governance. And the results are not merely shocking but show the direct effects from Georgia’s university system gutting tenure in 2021. Using the AAUP’s shared governance survey tool, we asked faculty at a large university to tell us…
BY THE BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION It is expected that the University of California Board of Regents will announce the appointment of a new Chancellor of the Berkeley campus on April 10. On April 1, in anticipation of this appointment, the Berkeley Faculty Association posted the following open letter. UPDATE 4/10: The Regents have announced the…
BY MARK S. JAMES Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated. The most recent example of this…
BY THE GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER From donor influence scandals to Supreme Court boondoggles, there’s never a dull moment at George Mason University (GMU). Now, once again, Mason students and faculty find themselves under attack. This time, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and his political appointees on Mason’s Board of Visitors are coming for our…
BY JENNIFER RUTH I think he meant “scalped.” Right-wing activist Chris Rufo posted “SCAPLED: Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns” on X at 10 am today. He then reposted someone saying, “Claudine Gay’s is a huge scalp. No doubt about it. Especially when combined with Liz Magill’s a week ago. But we cannot rest on our…
BY TIMOTHY KAUFMAN-OSBORN Much has been said about the radical right’s assault on the autonomy of US public higher education and that campaign’s subversion of academic freedom. Today, for example, we all know about Florida’s Stop WOKE Act as well as it successor, SB 266, which expressly prohibits faculty from teaching that “systemic racism, sexism,…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE By definition, a military base, regardless of location, is a potential military target in a time of war. Adults, be they enlisted personnel or civilians, who work in such a place, a place dedicated to warfare, implicitly accept the risk of attack. The risk might be low and rarely discussed, but on…
BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AAUP CHAPTER The following statement was issued on December 14, 2023. Since October 7, Columbia University has experienced extraordinary, even unprecedented, challenges to academic freedom and violations of faculty governance. Untenured faculty have been harassed for organizing events squarely within their fields of expertise; a Barnard department…
BY LOUIS EPSTEIN Faculty have plenty of reasons to feel anxious, among them the widely publicized threats to our unique, enviable forms of shared governance. I won’t rehearse those threats here. If we spend more time bemoaning our present state than articulating our strengths, we’ll slip into a malaise from which recovery is unlikely. Instead,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the AAUP released a special investigative report, “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” In interview after interview with faculty members in Florida, the investigating committee, which I co-chaired, “heard repeated complaints not only about the silence of their campus and system administrators but also about…