BY AARON BARLOW Those advocating a permanent move online for a much greater proportion of college classes are, I think, purposefully conflating two different needs in their quest. The first is the need for all teachers to be comfortable using digital tools, something we all have been woefully remiss in fulfilling. The second is the…
BY BETHANY L. LETIECQ AND JUDITH A. WILDE This is the second in a series of three George Mason-AAUP Academe Blog posts on lessons learned from the presidential search campaign. Read the first post on GMU’s campaign here. Over the past year, two of the Washington, DC, region’s largest public universities lost their presidents. The…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from Remaking the University. Michael Meranze is Professor of History and Chair of the Academic Senate at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. COVID-19 has brutally laid bare the devastating impact of several decades of privatization and capitalist globalization.…
BY AARON BARLOW The organization Tenure for the Common Good has issued a Statement on Equitiy and Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Follow the link to read the whole of it, but here are the first few paragraphs: The COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges to higher education. Tens of thousands of faculty are suddenly moving…
BY JOHN K. WILSON MacMurray College in southern Illinois, which announced yesterday that it will be closing its doors in May after operating for 174 years, was the first college I ever attended. Well, sort of. It was a summer math camp for high school students, with the lure of receiving college credit for attendance.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Rev. Joseph Lowery, known as the “dean” of the Civil Rights Movement, died yesterday at the age of 98. His list of accomplishments bringing justice to America is so long that many obituaries of him have overlooked a key one: He was the last surviving figure from the New York Times…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Before the COVID-19 pandemic absorbed everyone’s attention, brought much of the country to a halt, and pushed higher education, what continues of it, online, the higher ed community was focused on the remarkable wildcat strike of graduate student employees that began at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and…
BY AARON BARLOW I am keeping technological interfaces with students to a bare minimum out of compassion and to assist learning. My students have enough to deal with right now; they don’t need additional troubles from platforms they don’t know and technologies they may not be able to access. They are New York City residents…