BY JOE LOCKARD Book bans and censorship in middle and high schools also affect higher education. They shape the reading knowledge of students who graduate and enter colleges and universities. An absence of knowledge about racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity and histories among incoming students creates learning gaps and campus culture problems. Crucially, censorship…
BY MELISSA CHADBURN In 2023, I was confounded by my humanness as I entered my first full-time visiting faculty position in my mid-forties. The brain fog. The creeping anxiety. Feeling my confidence and capacity to speak in front of other people vanish, even though I had a lot of experience with public speaking, panels, and…
BY KATIE RAINWATER This post follows up on, and covers new developments related to, the author’s June 15 Academe Blog post. In June, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACSCOC)—the traditional accreditor for the Southeastern United States, now also called the Commission on Colleges and Universities (CCU)* —released a first draft of new standards…
BY D.J. HOPKINS AND ZACH JUSTUS It’s time for your department to produce its annual assessment report. You and your colleagues have agreed on the learning outcomes to measure, and you have the data, but no one looks forward to this task, so you put it off. You answer emails, do some compliance training, and…
BY ROGER OCHSE I ran a company for fourteen years, sold it in 1990, and chose a classroom over a boardroom. I’ve taught college classes for more than forty years total, some of which overlapped with my time running the company, though most came after. I kept teaching once I retired from full-time faculty work—several…
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 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 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 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,…