BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Our AAUP Chapters of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) recently published a timeline listing milestones in our first seven years of organizing. While we have yet to achieve our goal of equal pay for equal work and truly shared governance, our influence in the statewide, thirteen-college Colorado Community College System has…
BY THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP The National Coalition Against Censorship today sent this letter, co-signed by the AAUP, to Zoom, Facebook, and Youtube regarding the censorship of an event at San Francisco State University. October 8, 2020 Dear Mr. Yuan, Mr. Zuckerberg, and Ms. Wojcicki: As organizations dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, the…
BY AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION AND HIGHER ED ASSOCIATIONS The AAUP was one of fifty-five higher education associations that signed a letter sent on September 30 by the American Council on Education (ACE) to the US Department of Education secretary Betsy DeVos opposing the department’s announcement that it would investigate Princeton University after university president…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On September 29 I had the honor and privilege of participating, along with fellow AAUP Committee A member Joan Wallach Scott, in a webinar on academic freedom and student activism sponsored by the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. The discussion was moderated by…
BY SOCIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION PRESIDENTS The following letter was sent on September 30 by presidents of sociological organizations to express concern about threatened consequences for two sociology professors who participated in September 8 and 9 #Scholarstrike activities. It was initially signed by twelve presidents, and an additional president signed on later. TO: President Michael K. Young…
BY DISARM PSU At Portland State University, students, faculty, staff, and our broader community have been engaged in seven years of organizing, protesting, and collaborating under an umbrella coalition called “Disarm PSU” since the 2014 decision by PSU to transform its Campus Public Safety Office (CPSO) into a sworn and armed police force. While many…
BY THE CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY HISTORY DEPARTMENT Responding to President Donald Trump’s September 17 attack on history that is not “patriotic”, and in particular, the “1619” feature in the New York Times, the Chapman University History Department decided to go public with their reply, posting it to The Panther, the university’s student newspaper. Under the heading,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This week the College Free Speech Survey was released, which was developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the conservative website RealClearEducation, and the research firm College Pulse, and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. It is being marketed as the largest survey ever conducted of students about…
BY J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL Alain Badiou once remarked that philosophy was “democratic” insofar as anyone is capable of critical thinking, but “undemocratic” because the pursuit of truth is not the same as voting according to one’s subjective opinion. In my opinion, this position is the basis for critical thinking and critical scholarship––anyone is capable of critical…
BY NAN ENSTAD Nearly every day there is bad news about draconian cuts to a college or a university system as the economic emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic compounds decades of crisis in higher education in the United States. We can expect such cuts to continue and worsen unless we change course in how…