seal of Wheeling Jesuit University

Financial Exigency at Wheeling Jesuit University

BY WJU FACULTY Below is the text of a statement issued by Wheeling Jesuit University faculty on March 18. In response to Wheeling Jesuit University’s recent declaration of financial exigency, on Friday, March 15, 2019, the WJU faculty passed a Resolution requesting that the administration prioritize and commit publicly to providing for the educational needs…

The End of Forced Arbitration at Purdue Global

BY DAVE NALBONE Recently, Purdue University Global (PUG) announced that it would abide by federal laws prohibiting the use of forced arbitration to resolve disputes by its students, which until then had been a requirement of its students in order to enroll. This predatory practice dated to PUG’s former iteration, the for-profit and predatory Kaplan…

PTSD typed on to page in a manual typeweriter

Stress and PTSD in the Academy

BY JANE HARTY There is evidence that teaching in higher education can lead to long-term health issues brought on by stress, especially for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. Although the achievement of tenure can mitigate long-term stress, it certainly is not eliminated for those tenured faculty who are targeted for dismissal for one reason or another. An…

black and white photo of two men at an AAUP Committee A meeting in 1972

Remembering William Van Alstyne

BY DAVID M. RABBAN William Van Alstyne, for decades a major leader in the AAUP and a preeminent scholar of constitutional law, died on January 29, 2019, at the age of eighty-four. He joined the AAUP in 1960, at the beginning of his career as a law professor, and twice served as president of the…

colorful "welcome" sign

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…

Scrabble tiles spelling out the word "assess"

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…

screenshot of YouTube video by Irami Osei-Frimpong, who is speaking into a microphone

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…