BY HENNING SCHROEDER In recent COVID-19 updates, the president’s office at the University of Minnesota announced that graduation ceremonies planned for May 2020 will need to be canceled, postponed, or “socially distant.” This is truly sad news for our students, their friends, their relatives, and the entire university community. Similar decisions are being made at…
BY KAITLIN POMERANTZ The following is reposted with permission from Hyperallergic, “a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society.” Kaitlin Pomerantz is an artist and educator in Philadelphia. In the short story “Swim Team,” by Miranda July, the protagonist teaches a group of people in a land-locked town to swim without…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ, TIM GIBSON, AND BETSY DEMULDER This is the first in a series of three George Mason-AAUP Academe Blog posts on lessons learned from the presidential search campaign. Presidential searches conducted at public universities have become secretive processes that exclude most if not all forms of public vetting and engagement. Historically, finalists for…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement today on the coronavirus (COVID-19). As we are learning, COVID-19 (the coronavirus) has the potential to present a serious challenge to the health and safety of our campus communities. At this time, campuses in Washington State, New York State, California, Nebraska, and elsewhere have…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The labor action that began with the grade strike in Santa Cruz and has now spread throughout the [U]niversity [of California] has…
BY 36 COMMUNITY COLLEGE SUPPORTERS In December 2017, as the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities (CSCU) system office was preparing its “Students First” consolidation plan, the system’s Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) presented an extended critique of the proposal. It was not supportive, recommended other paths, and contained the following warning: “We believe that there is…
BY JOEL BERKOWITZ We thought the process would be straightforward. As it turns out, things got twisted. More than once. It all started with a simple invitation. As president of my campus’s chapter of the AAUP, I invited Joerg Tiede, senior program officer and researcher for the national organization, to come to campus to give a presentation of…
BY TERRY CARTER High-quality academic scholarship often goes unpublished due to lack of space and increased competition for peer-reviewed and other traditional print publications. Would clear and highly visible higher education guidelines encourage institutions to accept digital scholarship? I argued for such guidelines in a presentation entitled “Academic Freedom in the Digital Technology Age: Exploring…
BY JAMES FERRY Academe editor Michael Ferguson reached out to me. He recalled that one of my gigs was teaching at a local prison, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing an article about my experiences. I leaped at the chance since graduate students don’t often get pitched on publishing opportunities.…
BY JENNIFER BRIER AND JORDAN “JT” TURNER Despite decades of activism and change, LGBTQ college students continue to face challenges that affect their experiences with higher education. Some are similar to what straight and cis students confront on a daily basis—economic struggles that make paying for school a significant hardship or mental health issues that…