BY JONATHAN REES Back in the 1990s, I studied labor history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Naturally, I belonged to the Teaching Assistants’ Association, the first graduate student union in the country. When I arrived in Colorado as a tenure-track academic, I naturally wanted to know if I could somehow duplicate my positive…
BY JONATHAN REES I swear the first time I heard about AI in the way that that term is being used lately is when John Oliver married a cabbage. Then, because this was before the great Twitter exodus happened, just about everyone in my feed started posting absolutely ridiculous essays they got when they started…
BY JONATHAN REES The Colorado Conference of the AAUP held its annual meeting in Denver last Saturday. Our special guest was Mike DeCesare from the national AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. He gave us a primer on shared governance. I have a feeling that most of you reading this know what shared…
BY JONATHAN REES Did your online social life survive the Great Twitter Exodus of 2022? Although I’ve found Mastodon to be somewhat useful in this regard, I lost track of far too many online “friends” to count. That has only just now started to change. For example, Audrey Watters made her well-earned reputation during the…
BY JONATHAN REES The key part of what the AAUP Redbook has to say about the role of faculty in the selection of a new university president is in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities: “Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The…
BY JONATHAN REES Did you know that Donald Trump has promised to create a free national online university if he gets to become president again? You can read the basics of his proposal in Politico: Donald Trump wants to “revolutionize” higher education if elected president. And in a new campaign policy video, he is pledging…
BY JONATHAN REES We’ve been arguing over salaries at my university. Sometimes we get cost-of-living adjustments, but those almost never keep up with inflation (even during years when inflation is low). There’s a model developed by our Faculty Compensation Committee designed to allocate additional funds on the basis of equity, but what is equity, anyway?…