BY GRANT MINCY Buried inside the Department of Education’s proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule sits a single provision, § 602.23(j), that reads on the surface like a narrow housekeeping matter. The provision tells accreditors not to second-guess how a state appoints the members of a public college’s governing board. Appointment mechanics are properly…
BY B. M. RYAN In Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, Frank Bruni’s intervention into the admissions debate was built around a stabilizing claim: Where you go is not who you’ll be. It was an argument against status anxiety, against the idea that elite college admission determined life…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY I am the book review editor for Academe. While we continue to have an eager set of reviewers for upcoming issues of the magazine, I am interested in expanding our network of book reviewers. I have a list of books available in both print and digital formats you can choose from to…
BY SYDNEY FREEMAN JR. Too many scholars of color are leaving the academy, and too few higher education organizations, faculty senates, and faculty advocates are doing tangible work to combat this. After fifteen years in the academy, I recently stepped away from a tenured full professor position at a Research 1 university after receiving outside…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Please share widely. Faculty in the South Colleague: That’s you in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Georgia conference of the American Association of University Professors and its partners in states across the South would like to know your opinion as a…
BY JAMES RIVER ROBBINS I was at an educators’ union meeting recently when a member raised the issue of reproductive care. Their argument was simple: With institutions and governments cutting away at members’ reproductive rights, the union should stand behind its members and, at minimum, connect them with accurate information about reproductive health. Before I…
BY HANK REICHMAN What might celebrated incidents of “academic misconduct,” specifically plagiarism and falsifications, tell us about the crisis of academia? Recent events offer some suggestions. Jason Arday, who days earlier had resigned as professor of sociology at Cambridge University in the wake of credible charges of plagiarism and fabrication, was found dead August 14. …
BY VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY AAUP The Vanderbilt University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) registers its profound disagreement with the Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s “Declaration of First Principles” (July 29, 2026) as well as its opposition to the Department of Education’s “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards” (August 3,…
BY HANK REICHMAN “If at first you don’t succeed . . .” The Trump administration is at it again. With their much-ballyhooed “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education” a fantastic flop and their campaign of intimidation generating growing resistance, they’re now trying a new tactic in their ongoing efforts to reshape higher education to accord…
BY STEVEN W. THRASHER On July 20, I filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University and—in his official capacity as Chairman of the US House of Representatives House Committee on Education and the Workforce— Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg. The suit is also against various actors in the federal government who have pressured Northwestern, including Secretary of Education…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the AAUP released a major new report—”Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance”—prepared by a joint subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Committee on College and University Governance exposing how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to governance into higher…
BY EILEEN BORIS AND KRISTIN AHLBERG In an interview with journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Donald Trump claimed to be a great man, on par with world-shattering figures like Mao, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan—or so a “presidential historian” told him. That this presidential historian was the caddy for golfing star Gary Player…
BY KEVIN W. CAPEHART In the last century, higher education evolved from serving an elite few to schooling a slightly broader swath of students. Yet even in the twenty-first century, too many universities remain too focused on trying to train only one kind of intelligence, human intelligence. In doing so, universities are discriminating against artificial…
BY DANIEL SPARKS Federal and state policy landscapes are changing rapidly in higher education. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes a “do no economic harm” accountability provision limiting all colleges’ access to Title IV loans if programs fail to meet state earnings thresholds as determined by the Department…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT The AAUP received a request for correction of statements in this report regarding Princeton University’s policies on faculty meetings. On August 7, 2026, the text of this post was updated to clarify the university’s policies. Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber has carefully curated his public reputation as a defender of free…
