BY LAURA W. PERNA According to a January 2020 Gallup poll, only 27 percent of adults in the United States believe that college is affordable. Democratic presidential candidates have responded to these concerns with proposals for free tuition at community colleges, student loan debt-forgiveness, and more. Some proposals, like increasing the amount of money that…
BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions…
BY OLGA GARCÍA ECHEVERRÍA This creative essay was inspired by Jane Harty’s Academe Blog post “Stress and PTSD in the Academy” and modeled after Judy Brady’s 1971 satirical feminist essay “I Want a Wife.” I belong to a category of workers known as adjuncts. I am an adjunct. According to the Oxford online dictionary, an…
BY STEVE MUMME AND CAPRICE LAWLESS This op-ed appeared originally in the Boulder Daily Camera [openforum@dailycamera.com]. It’s indicative of the dire state in which Colorado’s Community College System adjunct instructors now labor that the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado branch launched a Christmas season GoFundMe campaign to help tide them through the annual…
BY DANE KENNEDY The George Washington University faculty and staff ain’t got no culture. Or worse, we’ve got a negative culture. This was the verdict of the Disney Institute, which the president of our university commissioned last year to assess the culture on our campus. Fortunately, the institute, which is the “professional development and external…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE The higher education news from China late last year was chilling to all who value academic freedom. Three major universities—Fudan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi Normal—under the direction of the government’s Ministry of Education, deleted “freedom of thought” from their charters and added pledges to follow Communist Party leadership, according to reports from Reuters.…
BY JAYATI GHOSH Jayati Ghosh, one of the world’s leading development economists, is professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and executive secretary of International Development Economics Associates (Ideas). She is co-recipient of the International Labour Organisation’s 2010 Decent Work Research prize. For some U.S. press coverage of these events go here, here…
BY JOAN WALLACH SCOTT Joan Wallach Scott is Professor Emerita of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of AAUP Committee A. These remarks were delivered at a panel on “Academic Freedom and the Historical Profession” at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in New York on January 6. …
BY STEVEN LUBET It was inevitable that the film “Remember the Titans” would be mentioned in the headlines of Herman Boone’s obituaries. He was the real-life African American football coach of a real-life integrated high school team in Alexandria, Virginia, that won the real-life 1971 state championship, and he passed away last month at age…
BY ERIC SANDGREN The following was published as an op-ed column on December 27 in the Wisconsin State Journal and is reposted with permission. The original column may be found here. Eric Sandgren is Professor of Experimental Pathology at UW Madison and vice-president of the Wisconsin state conference of the AAUP. The next University of…