BY AMY HAGOPIAN AND EVA CHERNIAVSKY Recent news reports confirm what we’ve suspected: hate crimes in the U.S. are up. (Hate crimes are those crimes that target people based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability, or national origin.) Last July, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported more than 940 potential bias incidents targeting Muslims just during…
BY ALTHA CRAVEY I’ve been attending UNC Board of Governors’ meetings for about three years. I knew it was important to understand the Board’s increasing willingness to interfere in campus affairs across the state. The Board had already ceased being a bi-partisan Board with equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, a “gentleman’s agreement” that…
BY MICHAEL BEHRENT The “free speech” policy currently under consideration by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors could impose a “chill” on “constitutionally protected speech” on UNC campuses, according to a prominent First Amendment Scholar. Officers of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently spoke with Professor William P. Marshall…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Happy Halloween! It’s Campus Equity Week, when faculty, students, and communities on campuses across the country shine a light on the increasingly precarious nature of academic work. The graphic below, created by AAUP digital organizer Mariah Quinn, captures the scary reality of our higher education system, in which contingent appointments now account…
BY JOHANN NEEM Johann N. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General issued the findings of a long-awaited audit in which it concluded that Western Governors University (WGU) had defrauded the…
BY AARON R. HANLON Aaron Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. He writes regularly on issues related to free speech on campus, including recently in the New York Times. The notion that college student protesters are reacting to “offensive” speech has held outsized influence in national debates about free speech and student…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ AND BILLY CZERWINSKI Tuesday night, the US Senate voted to gut a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that gave consumers, including student loan borrowers, recourse against banks who cheat us. This was a particularly remarkable act in light of recent revelations that Wells Fargo had fraudulently opened over three million fake accounts…
BY ANNIE ADAMS Annie Adams is a faculty member and AAUP chapter member at Morehead State University. Decreases in state appropriations, increases in tuition, public doubt about the “value” of higher education, and exploding student debt—these are the contexts within which we need to discuss high cost of intercollegiate athletics. In this “new normal” of…
BY FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN I had been elected in early May 2017 to the position of director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University NJ. after the previous director stepped down without completing her three-year term, and after someone else who was elected to succeed her also stepped down, within…
BY YALI AMIT, ANTON FORD, ELAINE HADLEY, AND DENIS HIRSCHFELDT The following piece was written by these members of the University of Chicago faculty: Yali Amit, Professor of Statistics; Anton Ford, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Elaine Hadley, Professor of English; and Denis Hirschfeldt, Professor of Mathematics. Graduate student employees at the university will vote tomorrow…