BY ALICE BROWN During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Howard Dean spoke about her plan to set aside $25 billion for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and to make public universities tuition-free. Afterwards, I asked, “What are Hillary’s plans for the small private colleges scattered across the country, most in rural regions?” His response…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Last summer, even as COVID-19 cases were surging, university leaders in North Carolina tried to engineer a return to normal by August 2020. It famously failed. Soon after the start of the semester yielded a burst of COVID-19 clusters, the state’s two flagship universities, UNC–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, shut…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Dear Colleagues, Are you troubled by the direction that the University of Maryland has headed in recent years? We are. In March 2021, we relaunched the University of Maryland Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (UMD AAUP) because we believe a different university is possible.…
BY PAUL CAMPOS The following is reposted with permission from the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog. Paul Campos is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Here are some numbers that I hope speak for themselves. ALL FIGURES ARE INFLATION-ADJUSTED INTO CONSTANT 2018 OR 2019 DOLLARS. Salary of full-time faculty at American colleges…
BY STEVEN LUBET Hank Reichman’s recent post on the Bandy Lee case at the Yale Medical School raises an important point that deserves some further consideration. To recap, Dr. Lee has sued Yale for firing her from an unpaid, part-time position in the psychiatry department. Lee’s offense involved tweeting about the mental health of Donald…
BY SANDRA STEINGRABER The following column by Sandra Steingraber, distinguished scholar in residence in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College, appeared in the March 3 edition of The Ithacan. For the past 18 years, I have served as our campus’ scholar in residence, recruited by a previous provost with a vision…
BY DEBORAH CAFIERO During the COVID-19 crisis, the pace of cuts to foreign language departments and programs, already brisk before the pandemic, has accelerated. The devaluation of language study is necessary, so the argument goes, to reduce costs and trim programs that elicit minimal student interest. Besides, English is becoming the lingua franca of the…
BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical…
BY BILL BERGMAN The differences between first-year college students and seniors were more pronounced than ever during the fall semester. I had a firsthand glimpse while teaching both a first-year seminar and upper-level marketing classes on campus. While I could never really see the mask-covered faces of first-year students in my classes, their eyes sparkled…