BY RABAB IBRAHIM ABDULHADI The author was one of three 2020 recipients of the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and, through that work, improved the profession in general. Because…
BY CHAMPLAIN AND SAINT MICHAEL’S COLLEGE AAUP CHAPTERS The Champlain and Saint Michael’s College AAUP chapters wrote a joint letter last week protesting the recent pay cuts to non-tenured faculty at the University of Vermont and in support of the UVM AAUP chapter, which is currently engaged in bargaining with the university administration. The letter,…
BY JEFFREY ISAAC Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He posted these thoughts about reopening IU on his personal blog, and we are reposting them with his permission. In the past month it has become much clearer how U.S. colleges and universities will handle the coming Fall semester…
BY THE FACNET STEERING COMMITTEE An Open Letter to College and University Faculty We are a diverse group of faculty at all levels, at institutions throughout the United States. We would like to invite any interested faculty, from teaching assistants and adjuncts to tenured professors, to join us in founding nonpartisan national and state-level faculty networks to…
BY JACOB A. BENNETT Results from a survey of University of New Hampshire undergraduate students were discussed at the April 2020 meetings of the University System of New Hampshire Board of Trustees, indicating that only “30% of students felt they continue[d] to learn effectively” after the abrupt and necessary shift to remote learning this past…
BY BRIAN CONNOLLY As universities across the country responded to COVID-19 with various austerity measures, including mass layoffs and furloughs, coupled with an insistence on returning faculty, staff, and students to campus, a group of faculty at the University of South Florida drafted a set of principles and submitted them to the administration. The aim…
BY STEVE MOCKABEE AND PHOEBE REEVES, University of Cincinnati AAUP The AAUP-UC chapter leaders believe strongly that the University of Cincinnati’s budget should prioritize UC’s mission to serve the public good through teaching and research. This is why we have been promoting a Fight for 51% campaign urging university leaders to allocate the majority of…
BY BOB NOWLAN One of the most egregious dimensions of outgoing University of Wisconsin system president Ray Cross’s May 7 “Blueprint for the University of Wisconsin System Beyond COVID-19”—which calls for a radical restructuring and effective elimination of the comprehensive dimension of the system’s eleven regional comprehensive universities, as well as an effective jettisoning of…
BY JOHN MCNAY One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get our college and university administrators to put education first and not allow the resources of the institutions to get hijacked for other purposes. The inability to focus on the real problems is widespread and yet the…
BY JOHN STREAMAS I have been better treated by university police than by administrators. But then, as a biracial Asian immigrant, I could pass for white. Several students of color—mostly black students but some Latinx and a few Asian Pacific and indigenous students as well—have reported to me harassment by local police. Some black male…