BY THE AAUP The AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession today issued the following principles and recommendations: Our world is today engulfed in the global COVID-19 pandemic, with enormous loss of life. The unemployment rate was 10.2 percent in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many higher education institutions are preparing to…
BY COLLEEN DALY MARTINEZ WITH MARIAN AHN THORPE The part-time lecturer (PTL) unit of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union is fighting for longer, more secure contracts, salary increases, and healthcare for PTLs. The full-time faculty and graduate unit reached a tentative agreement on April 16. Marian Ahn Thorpe, a graduate member of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, interviewed PTL…
BY JANE HARTY There is evidence that teaching in higher education can lead to long-term health issues brought on by stress, especially for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. Although the achievement of tenure can mitigate long-term stress, it certainly is not eliminated for those tenured faculty who are targeted for dismissal for one reason or another. An…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Hauling rocks. Nailing fence posts. Painting walls. Babysitting. Folding sweaters. Making photocopies. Cleaning horse stalls. Laying sod. Pouring coffee. Packaging candies. Watering plants. Driving UPS vans. Delivering pizzas. Delivering flowers. This is just a short list of what many of America’s 768,000 college teachers will be doing this summer to try to…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Activists have been fighting for years for decent working conditions and pay for adjuncts and graduate student instructors. The majority of these activists are adjuncts and graduate students themselves. They have formed collective bargaining units under the auspices of the AAUP and other unions, and they have created organizations such as the…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS New, federal-level unemployment changes are good news for adjunct faculty in the Colorado Community College System. Depending on your circumstances, you may qualify for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. That was not the case previously. It’s good news for adjunct faculty in the CCCS, as it is for all adjunct/contingent faculty throughout American…
BY ROBIN MEADE I can’t title this article “I Won” because I already used that title. But now I have won a $125,000 settlement and reinstatement after being fired for criticizing the administration of Moraine Valley Community College. The fact that I keep winning in court should provide everyone with hope and embolden those in…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Guest blogger Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is past president of the Modern Language Association. He first published this post on his Facebook page; it is reposted here with his kind…
BY AARON BARLOW Kevin Birmingham, who teaches at Harvard as an adjunct, gave a talk last October on accepting the Truman Capote Award. It is reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I’d recommend that each of us who is tenured or on the tenure track read it. Birmingham writes: I sometimes wonder when the ripples widened…
BY EVA SWIDLER Guest blogger Eva Swidler is an environmental historian on the undergraduate liberal arts faculty at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music. She also researches and writes in the fields of labor studies and political economy. Academic freedom is all the rage in newspapers these days. Are protests at speaking events on…