Against Street Protests

BY JOHN K. WILSON Like most Americans, I was sickened by the senseless violence and destruction across the country this weekend, just as I was sickened by the murder of George Floyd. In recounting the terrible acts this past week, let me start at the top, with the evil and incompetence of Donald Trump. In…

U.S. Senate Hearing on Re-Opening Campuses in the Fall

BY MARTIN KICH On Thursday, the U.S. Senate will hold a committee hearing on re-opening college campuses in the fall. The hearing will be available live online. I am not sure what actual impact such a hearing will have since federal coordination of the COVID-19 response has been negligible. But the hearing may affect the…

Who Lacks Credibility? A Response to Israel-Academia-Monitor

BY HANK REICHMAN On Thursday, May 28, a website called Israel-Academia-Monitor published an “editorial note” entitled “AAUP Losing Credibility over the Palestinian-Israeli Dispute.”   It begins: The prestigious academic organization, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), is losing credibility.  Founded in 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape the standards and procedures of higher…

Two Paths Into and Out of the Crisis

BY HANK REICHMAN Two articles from today’s (London) Times Higher Education discuss how higher education systems in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, which have embraced privatization and corporatization, and systems in continental Europe, which have largely retained the public funding model, are faring in the face of the challenges posed by the fiscal implications…

magnifying glass on top of colorful file folders

Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2019-20

BY THE AAUP RESEARCH OFFICE This year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession summarizes results from the 2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey, which collected data from 928 colleges and universities across the United States, including community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and major research universities. The survey covered almost 380,000 full-time and more…

100,000 Deaths, Measured in Class Time

BY MARTIN KICH One of my most widely read posts to this blog has addressed the difficulty not only in visualizing a million, a billion, and a trillion dollars but also in conceptualizing the great differences between those numbers, which do after all sound a lot alike. So, today, as we grapple with the reality…

Do Adjuncts Have Academic Freedom?

BY DEIRDRE FRONTCZAK The following article appears in the current issue of FACCts, magazine of the Faculty Association for the California Community Colleges.  It is posted here with permission of FACCC and the author.  Deirdre Frontczak is adjunct professor of philosophy at Santa Rosa Junior College and lecturer in marketing and management at Santa Clara…

An Interest, Scholarly and Otherwise, in Rare Photos

BY MARTIN KICH The publication of a new biography of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, written by his now elderly “step-sister,” Annye Anderson, with the assistance of Preston Lauterbach. As with just about everything else associated with Johnson, his blood relation to Annye Anderson is actually not quite…