BY JOHN McNAY Colleges and universities are being pummeled by the financial impact of the coronavirus. Every day brings more bad news: cuts to state support, large deficits, questionable fall enrollment, and questions as to what degree campuses will be open. Yet, amid the human tragedy, we should see the crisis as an opportunity for…
The following is a press release from the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter. Rutgers AAUP-AFT has filed a lawsuit to force the Rutgers University administration to come clean about the huge sums of money it funnels to an athletics program that continually loses money. The suit, filed last Friday, asks a superior court judge to require the…
BY MARCUS ALFRED, ERIN D. CHAPMAN, PHILIP N. COHEN, HEIDI LI FELDMAN, BETHANY L. LETIECQ, BINH Q. TRAN, AND JULIA G. YOUNG We are professors at universities across the DC metropolitan area. And, like so many of our colleagues nationwide, we fear our communities will not be safe if DC-area colleges and universities open as…
BY ALARMED FACULTY MEMBERS AT NATIONAL UNIVERSITY This spring and summer of COVID has witnessed a perhaps unprecedented assault on faculty rights, as institution after institution, claiming some sort of exigency, have laid off both contingent and tenured faculty members, restructured programs, and short-circuited established institutions of shared governance. In many cases the challenges are…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Last week on Academe Blog, John Wilson argued that one idea proposed by Princeton faculty members who wrote a July 4 letter calling for anti-racist reforms is misguided. The signatories ask Princeton administrators to “constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents,…
BY KIMBERLY BERNHARDT Like many of my colleagues across the country, I am unsure whether I will be teaching face-to-face, online, or hybrid courses this fall. While I hope to adapt my teaching to whatever model is necessary to serve students, I am not confident that our current pedagogical framework—in which students work throughout the…
BY MICHAEL A. DOVER Recently Danielle Smith, executive director of the Ohio Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, asked, “If you only have fifteen minutes to talk to a brand-new-to-the-topic mostly wealthy, white audience about racism/white supremacy culture and how this plays out in the organizations they lead . . . what would…
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…