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…
BY MARK S. JAMES This blog post originally appeared on the Molloy College AAUP chapter website. We are reposting it here with the author’s permission. Dear Colleagues, I am a black man in America. I grew up in a white family that didn’t want to talk about race. Yet race was everywhere. The dangers of…
BY A UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN FLORIDA* In one of my final classes in May, students started talking about how well J. K. Rowling described moments like the one we’re living through now, when young people worry about the great evil that hangs over them, and the adults in charge refuse to come out of denial.…
BY THE UC BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) is famed for its tough bargaining tactics in its dealings with its unions. From its ongoing conflict with AFSCME for failing to comply with its own rules around subcontracting, to a belligerent tendency to cancel AFT bargaining sessions at the…
BY AAUP WISCONSIN The following statement was released today by the AAUP’s Wisconsin state conference in response to the announcement of a sole finalist for University of Wisconsin system president. AAUP Wisconsin expresses its strong opposition to the selection of University of Alaska System President Jim Johnsen as the sole finalist for the position of…
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. On May 27, the three-month U.S. death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 100,000. The death toll in the state of Indiana…