Speaking Back When the University is Attacked
BY MARCO ABEL AND JULIA SCHLECK In our recent Academe article, “Academic Freedom, Radical Hospitality, and the Necessity of Counterspeech,” we revisit the incident on UNL’s campus that led to its censure last June to ask what administrations can do when faced with incidents like this one, in which a student advocating for the establishment…
Assessing Ourselves
BY JOHN SCHLUETER As I was writing my recent article for Academe, “In Search of What We Do,” my college was in the throes of reaccreditation, and faculty were tasked with standardizing their assessments of student work based on outcomes revised with the help of Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, for me—and I would venture to guess…
Protecting Extramural Speech
BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON Is it possible to go a month without a controversy about the extramural speech of a faculty member? Probably not. There are, after all, a lot of faculty out there, and they have greater unmediated access than ever before to put their views about matters both great and small before a…
Nunez Community College’s Dismissal of Professor Was Likely Retaliatory
BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER According to an AAUP investigative report released today, the most plausible explanation for the dismissal of a faculty member from Nunez Community College was that it occurred as a retaliatory measure, violating his academic freedom. Professor Richard Schmitt, a nontenured associate professor of English with twenty-two years of service at the institution,…
AAUP-WSU Negotiating Team Member Reflects on #Fighting4Wright
BY TOM ROONEY With permission, we are sharing the text of a Facebook post by Tom Rooney, AAUP-WSU treasurer and member of the union’s negotiating team. He wrote it this morning, after Wright State University faculty and the WSU administration came to a tentative agreement, ending the faculty strike that began on January 22. A journey…
Opportunities for Early Career Scholars with Disabilities
BY KERI L. RODGERS I am reaching out to share a career development opportunity for doctoral candidates or alumni who have disabilities as well as a service opportunity for faculty members interested in supporting early career scholars with disabilities. Please share this information with anyone who might be interested. Pre-Conference Seminar for Early Career Scholars…
Letter from a Wright State Student
BY LESLIE MARSH Guest blogger Leslie Marsh is an undergraduate in her senior year at Wright State University (WSU). Below is her response to a letter from Alpana Sharma, chair of the English languages and literature department, notifying her about the conversion of her full-semester course to a compressed seven-week course due to the ongoing…
A Question of Academic Integrity at UIC
BY ROBERT E. BIONAZ Robert Bionaz is a retired Chicago State University professor who made the original investigation about plagiarism in the dissertation of then-Chicago State interim provost Angela Henderson, who received a $694,000 settlement from the University of Illinois at Chicago because they revealed that they were examining her dissertation. This is his response…
AAUP Comments on Proposed Changes To Title IX Regulations
BY RISA L. LIEBERWITZ The AAUP submitted comments today on amendments proposed by US Department of Education to the regulations governing the implementation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. The AAUP responded, in particular, to a question posed by the education department about “the applicability of the…