Delphi Report on Contingent Faculty: A Professor’s Response

The following is a guest post by Donald Rogers. Rogers is the chair of the Organization of American Historians Committee on Part-Time, Adjunct and Contingent Faculty, and serves as the OAH liaison to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. He is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University. Recently, the…

How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps

This piece, by Debra Leigh Scott, originally appeared on the blog The Homeless Adjunct. It is reposted here with her permission: A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and…

Trading Academic Freedom for Foreign Markets

By Marjorie Heins, founder, Free Expression Policy Project The current controversy over Yale University’s planned campus in Singapore is, at bottom, an argument over how much compromise on free speech is justified in exchange for the presumed benefits of locating branches of U.S. universities within authoritarian regimes. Although the champions of global ventures like Yale’s…

Students Pepper-Sprayed for Wanting to Attend a Community College

This is a guest post by Lenore Beaky, a member of the AAUP Committee on Community Colleges. “Santa Monica College—The Shape of Things to Come, or The Future That’s Already Arrived?” What happened at Santa Monica College this spring embodies many of the most urgent threats and challenges facing community colleges in the United States now: vanishing…

A New Look at the Ward Churchill Case

This is a guest post by Don Eron, one of the authors of the just-published “Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill.“ The new AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom contains a report by the AAUP’s Colorado conference chronicling the University of Colorado’s prosecution of Native American studies professor Ward Churchill, in response to Churchill’s characterization of…

The Significance of Norman Finkelstein

By Matthew Abraham The facts on the Finkelstein case at DePaul have been covered in some detail elsewhere, so I will not review here what is already quite well known. It is difficult to dispute that DePaul was subjected to enormous financial and political pressure as it considered Finkelstein’s tenure application. The documentary record itself…

The Tenure Denial of Norman Finkelstein

By Peter Kirstein DePaul University denied Dr. Norman Finkelstein tenure and promotion to associate professor on Friday, June 8, 2007. I posted on my blog several leaked documents, none from Finkelstein I might add, including College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Chuck Suchar’s infamous non-recommendation for tenure. I was attending the AAUP annual meeting…

Why Idaho State’s Administration Fired Me

By Leonard Hitchcock, Professor Emeritus, Idaho State University Idaho State University (ISU) is currently under sanction by the AAUP. Details of its case are available online, in one of the AAUP’s investigative reports for 2011 (pdf). My own case is essentially a footnote to that report.