BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER As the national academic landscape makes clear, academic freedom battles are often diverted to or fought in the budgetary arena: Money talks! To ensure that the mission of the university is not overlooked by our administrators, our AAUP chapter has demanded greater transparency in budgetary decision-making processes. Instead, we receive annual notices…
BY ALLISON GAINER As faculty, we often find ourselves balancing pedagogy, policy, and student support. For students with disabilities, that support sometimes includes service dogs. These working animals are not pets or conveniences. They are medically necessary tools for independence, mobility, and safety. And yet, many of us have never been trained to support students…
BY DENISE L. DAVIS As we at Brown University wait for the other shoe to drop, we are mobilizing in support of the university’s principles, as expressed by President Christina H. Paxson, and urging the university administration to take an uncompromising stance when it comes to preserving free inquiry, ensuring the safety of non-US citizens…
BY AMIR HUSSAIN The Trump administration is trafficking in a grand narrative about American intellectuals: Universities are hiding “foreign aliens,” and outside agitators are disrupting campus operations in support of terrorist organizations. Scholars and students are being labeled as leftist protesters or, more brazenly, as so-called Hamas supporters and are being persecuted, detained, deported, and…
BY FACULTY LETTER ORGANIZERS The open letter discussed below originated after a group of faculty began to share notes about how their universities were handling the challenges presented by the Trump administration and about the apparent lack of communication or coalition building across institutions. In response to escalating federal attacks on higher education, a national…
BY REBECCA DOLHINOW AND DAVID SCHULTZ Rebecca Dolhinow of California State University, Fullerton, and David Schultz of Hamline University seek chapter proposals for an edited book anthology tentatively entitled Trumpism and the Corporate University. Trumpism and the Corporate University will be an edited volume that examines the rise of the corporate university over the last…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ The inexplicable budget cuts my financially-solvent university enacted through its 2023–24 APR process both portended and was practice for our current moment. The “headwinds,” justifications for why the university had to cut twenty programs before new system-wide performance-based metrics formally went into effect, have unsurprisingly arrived. If anyone working inside the university…
BY KATHLEEN M. ROMERO There is an undeniable level of prestige associated with achieving a Carnegie Classified level one research (R1) label for institutions of higher education. This status opens new doors to funding, innovation, and research opportunities, and elevates universities to an elite level. Achieving R1 status rebrands universities, offering the perception of a…
