BY JAMES FERRY When I submitted my piece for the September-October issue of Academe, “How the Academy Saved My Soul—and Maybe My Life,” I figured that, at best, I might end up guest blogging. So being asked to blog about my feature article feels a bit…weird. I’d much rather blog about why I lacked “contributor…
BY JOAN W. SCOTT Threats to academic freedom abound the world over and it is dismaying to confront one crisis situation after another. The latest news comes from Birzeit University, in the West Bank. Professors there, and at other Palestinian universities in the Occupied Territories, who hold foreign passports have been prevented by the Israeli…
BY BILL MULLEN WITH “LISA BARRISTER” In May of 2017, Purdue University announced that it had purchased Kaplan University, an on-line University, with the intention to turn it into a part of Purdue University. Since that time, Kaplan has been renamed Purdue Global University, and has already graduated its first group of students. Criticism of…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission 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. For previous posts on this topic go here and here. As part of their negotiations with the university, University of…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ AND AARON NISENSON The AAUP joined with the American Council on Education and thirty-five other higher education associations in filing an amicus brief in federal court this week opposing a challenge to race-based admissions at Harvard University. We argue that “a diverse student body is essential to educational objectives of colleges and universities,…
BY JOHN McNAY The Supreme Court’s attack on the labor movement last week by the five Republican justices was an unjust act rooted entirely in politics and having nothing to do with the Constitution. It is a right-wing fantasy to suggest that everything public union members do is a political act. With the increasing corporate…
POSTED BY STEVE MUMME AND MARGARET LECOMPTE Steve Mumme is a Professor at Colorado State University and the AAUP-Colorado Conference Co-President, and Margaret LeCompte is a Professor Emerita and President of the AAUP Chapter, University of Colorado at Boulder. Colorado’s college students are deemed by some to be civics deficient and University of Colorado Board of Regents…
BY JUDY A. VAN WYK I attended my first AAUP/AAUP-CBC Summer Institute in 2015. Even though I work just two floors below my colleague, Sandy Hicks, it was at this conference that she and I brainstormed our URI AAUP Membership Committee and developed our ambitious goals for the committee. Inspired by what we learned there,…
BY MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE In the days since Academe published my essay, “The Monument and the Wrecking Crew: Ageism in the Academy,” which explored the misery of individuals and the high costs to society at large of losing tenure, additional faculty members have written to tell me their formerly hidden stories. The ways of getting rid…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Joe Knott, a member of the Board of Governors of the UNC system, wrote in a News & Observer op-ed on May 25th that UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty suffers from lack of “viewpoint diversity,” by which he means too few conservative professors for his liking. How does he propose to fix this alleged…