BY PAUL DILLER COVID-19 vaccine mandates have been in effect at hundreds of universities for more than a year now. The 2022–2023 academic year is the second consecutive year during which many universities require some amount of COVID-19 vaccination from students, faculty, and staff. As the Centers for Disease Control’s recent guide to COVID-19 prevention…
BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE COVID-19 has disappeared from the headlines, but not from our lives or classes. What steps should we take this fall? We note thirteen. COVID-19 has been declared as endemic, necessitating continuing precautions like those taken against influenza. Campuses continue to be places of increased risk for communicable…
BY MARYBETH GASMAN Faculty are at the core of undoing systemic racism in faculty hiring. Within research universities—specifically those that are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU)—there are two factors that are most likely to determine who becomes a tenure-track faculty member. First, the institution a faculty candidate attends for their PhD and,…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Professors, lecturers, graduate teaching assistants, and especially presidents and provosts often repeat the word “literacy.” But they almost never pause to define or constructively criticize it. Why does it matter? That is a question I ask each of us to ponder. The Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung put it aptly: “What would…
BY ALEX ZUKAS In the latest act in a continuing coup against the faculty at National University that started in spring 2020, the interim president and board of trustees just imposed a faculty handbook that defines academic freedom and shared governance in ways that are unrecognizable to AAUP members as it completely hollows out those…
BY FELIX A. KRONENBERG AND VERNA CASE Recent events on campuses throughout the country, such as the coronavirus pandemic, innovations in technology and pedagogy, and changes in demographics, have created challenges for institutional leaders, faculty, students, and other constituents. We believe that such challenges can benefit from an understanding of the power of place in…
BY KRIS BOUDREAU AND MARK RICHMAN In her recent survey of a handful of research universities that have improved conditions for their teaching faculty—particularly those that provide job stability and paths for professional advancement—the Chronicle’s Becky Supiano suggests that while such a “teaching track” distinct from a tenure track can “elevate undergraduate instruction and the…
BY THOMAS J. PFAFF There is no shortage of articles addressing challenges and issues with shared governance on campuses. COVID-19 has accelerated the situation, as noted in an AAUP report that states, “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the most serious challenges to academic governance in the last fifty years.” The Chronicle also reports on this in…
BY DIANA C. SILVERMAN The poverty crisis in universities today has reached hallucinatory proportions. Fifty-eight percent of students were experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness, in a survey of 200,000 students at 202 different institutions of higher education in the year 2020 by Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. At the…
BY HOLLY HASSEL, KIRSTI COLE, AND JOANNE BAIRD GIORDANO Two recently published pieces purport to offer advice to academics about how to be successful in the profession. Jason Brennan, commenting on his new book, Good Work If You Can Get It, argued in a May 2020 interview, “For one, most service work is not worth…