BY BRANDON RODRIGUEZ Brandon Rodriguez is a native New Yorker whose family migrated from Puerto Rico. He grew up in the South Bronx and attends Guttman Community College, which is part of City University of New York (CUNY). This essay is reposted with permission from the Activist History Review blog. My world changed in early…
BY MALAKA SHWAIKH AND REBECCA RUTH GOULD February 2017 was a watershed month for the Palestine advocacy movement in the UK, although we only later came to realize its significance in our own lives. That month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were smeared in mainstream and local print and…
BY THE COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE OF AKRON-AAUP The members of the University of Akron Chapter of The American Association of University Professors have voted to not ratify the proposed collective bargaining agreement with The University of Akron Board of Trustees. The electronic balloting process ended at 1pm, Wednesday August 5th. The University’s Board of Trustees had…
BY THE WAYNE COLLEGE REDUCTION IN FORCE (RIF) FACULTY HIT LIST On July 15, 2020, the Board of Trustees, in consultation with the administration, at the University of Akron (UA) chose to eliminate ninety-six bargaining unit faculty. Those of us on that list of cut faculty call ourselves the Hit List. Although there are satellite…
BY EVONN WELTON In 2011, The University of Akron received an award from the American Psychological Association for being a healthy workplace environment. What a profound and sad irony that in less than ten years, it has become a place of financial hardship, possible injustices, fear, anxiety, and pitting faculty against faculty. It has become…
POSTED BY MARTY KICH As he has been doing for faculty at institutions across the United States for two decades, past AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum has provided a financial analysis to the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron. He has distilled the main points of that analysis into the following short video: https://akronaaup.org/uas-budget-presentation-dr-rudy-fichtenbaum-responds/. The…
BY HARRY R. LEWIS Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College. This essay is reposted from his blog. I used to visit Hong Kong regularly, and also made a few trips to mainland China. One of those trips put me in a provincial…
POSTED BY SUE RAMLO A couple of months ago, the Provost’s office sent faculty, through their deans, a survey, asking us what we thought the criteria for firings should be. Akron-AAUP saw this for what it was: direct dealing with faculty, and a failed attempt to legitimize the gutting of the faculty. At the time,…
BY KEVIN L. COPE The recent but thankfully short-lived ruling by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which had prohibited international students who take only online courses from remaining in the United States, intensely irritated an academic community already pushed to the emotional brink by budget cuts, the pandemic, and the erosion of respect for…