The following guest post was authored by David Rintoul, who is a biology professor and faculty senator at Kansas State University. Universities have many policies and procedures for resolving disagreements that arise between faculty members, between faculty members and administration, between faculty members and students, etc. Many of these are carefully crafted in order to…
By James Simeone The Illinois Wesleyan University AAUP reading group met on September 29, 2011 to discuss Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The discussion was framed by the censoring, earlier in September, of a student poet in Hansen Student Center. A…
Josh Boldt is a Writing Instructor and EdTech Consultant at the University of Georgia. This entry is cross-posted from his blog Copy & Paste. Yesterday, Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and newfound hero of contingent faculty everywhere, published the essay “Among the Majority” on the MLA website. The piece is a reflection…
By John Hinshaw Professors are often told that higher education should be run more like a business. You might think that I, as the President of the Pennsylvania AAUP, would disagree. But you’d be wrong. Look, even the AAUP is aware that higher ed has to change, and what could be better or more efficient…
Richard Delgado is University Professor of Law at Seattle University, where he teaches and writes in the areas of race and civil rights. Jean Stefancic is Research Professor of Law at Seattle University, where she teaches and writes about race, Latinos, and civil rights. They are the authors of The Latino/a Condition (NYU Press) and…
Marjorie Heins heads the Free Expression Policy Project (www.fepproject.org) and is the author of Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. In the 1990s she directed the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project; more recently, she has taught at NYU, UC-San Diego, and the American University of Paris. Her forthcoming book,…
By Jay Sosa Yesterday, graduate students from the University of Chicago handed a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) based in Washington DC, asking that they rule on the case of the New York University (NYU) graduate employee union by December 31. Sound confusing? Welcome to NLRB-land, where the board that adjudicates labor…
The following guest post is by Johann Neem, associate professor of history at Western Washington University: A recent paper by Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein argues that since many papers in literature are rarely cited, colleges and universities should reallocate their priorities in order to make better use of literature professors’ time. Prof. Bauerlein…
From the Colorado AAUP: The Colorado Conference of the American Association of University Professors has conducted an investigation into the University of Colorado’s dismissals of two members of its faculty. Phil Mitchell and Ward Churchill represent different sides of the same coin. One is a fundamentalist Christian identified with the political right wing; the other…
Diana Vallera is a Fine Artist and Photography Instructor at Columbia College of Chicago, and President of the Part-Time Faculty Union. In this essay based on a talk given last month at the Illinois AAUP meeting, Vallera analyzes Columbia College of Chicago (which has no connection to Columbia University), and the approach of the administration…