BY MEREDITH McCOOL When I first heard Stephanie O’Neill’s NPR story “Coronavirus Has Upended Our World. It’s OK to Grieve,” it helped me consider the range of emotions I was experiencing. Stress from the sudden changes. Disappointment from missed opportunities. However, the full weight of grief did not hit me until I began to consider…
BY THE FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY FACULTY WELFARE COMMITTEE/AAUP Alumni at Fairfield University organized around the hashtag #BlackStagsMatter after two statements from university administration in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Juneteenth did not directly address the need for concrete changes or the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of the alumni had been involved…
BY ANNE SISSON RUNYAN 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 award…
BY RACHAEL LEHMAN The most important relationship in education is between student and educator (we’ll use the terms professor, faculty, and teacher interchangeably). From the pre–K to doctoral levels, education today is a vestige of colonialism imbued with white supremacy and patriarchy. BIPOC students experience the negative impacts disproportionately of this colonized education system, but…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When it became increasingly obvious to me and my colleagues in Georgia through campus town halls and meetings that our university system would not institute a mask mandate for all during our upcoming fall semester, our AAUP chapter grew concerned. The why of that decision is surely political, since Georgia is a…
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…