The University President’s Dilemma

BY STEVE MUMME This guest post is by Steve Mumme of the Colorado Conference.  Knowledgeable observers of the higher education landscape will have noticed the dilemma that university presidents now suffer in the face of the Trump administration’s recent executive orders banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The U.S. President’s discriminatory hard line on…

Tenure-Track Responsibility and Adjunct Exploitation

BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Guest blogger Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is  past president of the Modern Language Association. He first published this post on his Facebook page; it is reposted here with his kind…

Betsy DeVos Is Right: Professors Are A Threat To The Trumpist Movement

BY LARA SCHWARTZ Guest blogger Lara Schwartz teaches law and government at American University School of Public Affairs. This is a cross-post of an essay that originally appeared on Huffington Post. We are sharing this here, with the permission of the author, because the original post generated a great deal of interest when shared on the AAUP Facebook…

Tasting the Honey

BY JOSHUA DOLEZAL Guest blogger Joshua Dolezal is a professor of English at Central College. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Cather Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging (University of Iowa Press, 2014). During my first year at a Christian…

American Authoritarianism and Academic Administration

BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest blogger Galen Leonhardy  teaches at Black Hawk College. For those who don’t know, we’ve had a recent hullabaloo at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. I’ve written before about how American authoritarianism plays out at my small community college in the heartland, but this most recent episode provides a tale especially worth…

Secretary DeVos on Faculty in Higher Education

BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM This is a guest post by AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University. In her speech at CPAC Secretary DeVos stated: “Now let me ask you: How many of you are college students? The fight against the education establishment extends to you too. The faculty, from adjunct…

Muscling My Way Over

BY ROB PLATH Guest blogger Rob Plath is a writer from New York. He lives in a subterranean hovel  with his cat Daisy. He is a member of the AAUP. I’m sitting in my car. Monday. 7:45 AM. Traffic is at a standstill. It takes me over 1-½ hours to drive 42 miles to the…

Raising our Voices on Threats to Peace

BY DAVID CORTRIGHT, ASHER KAUFMAN, GEORGE LOPEZ, ANN MISCHE, ATALIA OMER, JASON SPRINGS, SUSAN ST. VILLE, AND ERNESTO VERDEJA The statement shared below was crafted by a group of faculty members at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies during the first week of the new administration, as we watched the foundational values of our…