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…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Last summer, even as COVID-19 cases were surging, university leaders in North Carolina tried to engineer a return to normal by August 2020. It famously failed. Soon after the start of the semester yielded a burst of COVID-19 clusters, the state’s two flagship universities, UNC–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, shut…
BY ELYSE CRYSTALL In my circle of family and friends in Brooklyn, the word chutzpah could indicate admiration for someone who asserted herself, spoke truth to power in spite of what others thought: “She had the chutzpah to challenge the senator’s policy on Medicaid expansion.” More often, however, chutzpah expressed disgust at a person who…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE The higher education news from China late last year was chilling to all who value academic freedom. Three major universities—Fudan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi Normal—under the direction of the government’s Ministry of Education, deleted “freedom of thought” from their charters and added pledges to follow Communist Party leadership, according to reports from Reuters.…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Years ago a colleague scolded me for saying that UNC employees can’t have a union. Yes, they can, he said; it’s collective bargaining that’s proscribed. Rudy Fichtenbaum, national president of the AAUP, reminded us of that message this past weekend at the annual meeting of the North Carolina state AAUP conference, attended…
MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The bold print of UNC-Chapel Hill’s decision earlier this week to build a $5.3 million museum for “Silent Sam,” the controversial Confederate statue, was bad enough. But as people have had time to read the report released by the campus’s Board of Trustees on Monday, December 3, it has become apparent that…
BY THE NORTH CAROLINA AAUP CONFERENCE The following is, first, a press release from the North Carolina AAUP followed by the vision statement itself: Boone, NC/Chapel Hill, NC March 9, 2017 The state conference of the leading professional organization of American college professors has released a vision statement entitled “Reclaiming Higher Education for All North Carolinians”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Duke University has released the following statement on the NCAA’s decision to pull seven championship tournaments out of North Carolina in the 2016-2017 academic year: “We agree with the NCAA’s decision. Our position has been clear on this matter, which is that this legislation is discriminatory, troubling and embarrassing. We deplore…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here are several of the opening paragraphs of an article written by Des Bieler for the Washington Post: “he NCAA announced Monday that it was moving its slate of 2016-17 championship events set to be played in North Carolina out of that state. The college sports governing body made its decision…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following item is reposted from Remaking the University, a blog run by UCLA history professor Michael Meranze and UC-Santa Barbara english professor Chris Newfield. North Carolina Republicans Take Aim at State’s Historically Black and Native American Colleges Although overshadowed by North Carolina’s recent HB2 (forbidding transgender individuals from using the bathroom…