The following is the text of a media release issued this morning by the American Association of University Professors and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) today announced that they have agreed to work together as…
In what may hopefully be a small sign that the tide could be turning against a corporate-funded K-12 school “reform” movement that thrives on autocratic administration and the denigration of veteran teachers, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has resigned at the request of the school board, The New York Times reports today. …
Back on January 2 of this year I posted to this blog a piece entitled “How NOT to Oppose the Academic Boycott of Israel.” As should be well known to readers, the AAUP takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does oppose all academic boycotts as a matter of principle. Hence, when the American…
A few days ago Marty Kich posted an item on this blog that reported an effort by gun-rights advocates in Oklahoma to pass legislation that will allow guns to be brought onto the state’s 25 public college and university campuses. An officer of the state’s Second Amendment Association promotes the legislation in these terms: “’Anywhere…
Three weeks ago I posted to this blog a piece I titled “And Now There’s a Blacklist?” In that post I reported that an organization called the AMCHA Initiative, which claims it is “dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America,” had published what was “perilously close”…
History has always been contested. After all, whoever controls the past controls the future and whoever controls the present controls the past, or so George Orwell once famously put it. The latest example is the brouhaha raised by some conservatives over the College Board’s rather modest revision of the “curriculum framework” for high school Advanced…
A few days ago I posted a brief piece, “Which Banned Book Are You?“, that linked to a quiz posted by librarians at Columbus State Community College to promote the annual Banned Books Week, which runs through tomorrow. My post has since had over 5,000 visits and has been the most visited post on this…
Here’s a creative but effective educational and organizing tool that our colleagues in the AAUP chapter at Front Range Community College in Colorado have published and which merits the broadest distribution: The Adjunct Cookbook, described as “48 pages of foodbank-friendly concoctions,” including “No Bucks Coffee Drinks,” “The Frappes of Wrath,” as well as “high-fat,…
On Friday Judge Curtis Karnow refused to halt the October 27 trial that will determine if the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) properly evaluated City College of San Francisco (CCSF) before voting to revoke its accreditation. (Links to my previous posts on the CCSF accreditation controversy will be found at the conclusion…
Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed published a provocative article, “A House Divided,” suggesting that attitudes toward the summary dismissal of controversial professor Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois may reflect the “enduring power” of C.P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” thesis. Snow’s argument was that the academic world contains two distinctive and often conflicting cultures, that…