BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA-TWIN CITIES AAUP CHAPTER The following Statement on Hamline University’s Recent “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives: Challenges for Higher Ed Today and Tomorrow” Event – Sep 29, 2023 appeared on the website of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities chapter of the AAUP. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities chapter of the American…
BY BERNIE MACHEN The following is the text of remarks by University of Florida President Emeritus Bernie Machen at a naming celebration for the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies at UF on September 7, 2023. The Jewish people are integral to the development of our world and have made many contributions over the ages. …
BY ANDREW J. DOUGLAS Reposted from the Morehouse Newsroom with permission from the author. Once upon a time a Morehouse professor tried to unionize the faculty. Walter Chivers, the current namesake of the school’s cafeteria, was a professor of sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 until his retirement in 1968. He was also a labor…
BY SUSAN E. MASON May 11, 2023, marked the end of the federal COVID-19 public health emergency declaration. COVID-19 is not gone, to be sure, but we now have a better understanding of the severity and spread of the virus, how to protect ourselves, and how to protect our students. We were all in the…
BY DONALD A. DOWNS In late August, John Wilson posted a critique of the recently published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry. I have long respected Wilson’s views on higher education. In this case, however, I find his critiques misplaced. The Principles’ authors had two main objectives: garnering support for the Principles…
BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON It is not every day that a government minister writes to an American university president demanding that a book be immediately removed “from the curriculum of any of its courses” and that the institution “conduct a thorough review of the academic materials” used in its classes. But such is the demand…
BY JOHN A. ETERNO Faculty at many universities are experiencing frustration. Universities should be bastions of creativity, scholarship, and democracy, but administrators have been using a corporate management style which invariably leaves the faculty behind. Most importantly, shared governance, once a staple of higher learning, is becoming a relic of the past. Faculty, to the…
BY MARC STEIN As the academic year begins for California State University, the largest public university system in the United States, it’s a good time to review last year’s faculty-tenure-density report card for the state’s twenty-three campuses. The results—one B, seven Cs, twelve Ds, and three Fs—suggest that CSU administrators might need to work harder…
BY KATHRYN KLEPPINGER AND GWU COLLEAGUES On Friday, August 11, administrators at West Virginia University announced an “academic transformation” that would cut 32 majors and possibly 169 faculty positions across the university, including the entire World Languages Department. Of particular concern to us, as language faculty at The George Washington University, was the misrepresentation of our…
BY JAMIE GONZALES The impending closure of the UH LGBTQ Resource Center caused by the passing of Senate Bill 17 weighs heavy on my heart. For those unfamiliar with SB 17, it states that “the governing board of an institution of higher education shall ensure that each unit of the institution: (1) does not, except…