2025 Faculty in the South Survey
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Faculty in the South Describe a Climate of Fear on Campus, Grants Cancelled, and Students Impacted, Survey Finds A major new survey of higher education faculty across the South has revealed the significant impact of federal and state political attacks on faculty work and recruitment. The survey, conducted by multiple state conferences…
Shadowy Media Group Requests Syllabi Across the US
By Matthew Boedy Most if not all Georgia institutions got a public records request last week from a shadowy media group linked to a politically conservative “government transparency” coalition. I have been able to confirm 13 schools got the request. Here is what the group requested: A complete list of course syllabi for all undergraduate…
The Time to Act Is Now: Accreditation Edition
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Every AAUP member should be concerned about the new accreditation group recently birthed in Florida. This week Louisiana became the seventh state to say it was joining. While only for now targeting states in the South the group’s business plan shows its strategy is to take on as clients public schools in…
Public Syllabi Means Public Opportunities
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Recently my public university system in Georgia announced that all syllabi in our 25-school system would be made public through a searchable database. This fall “core” classes and those in the college of education will have syllabi public and others phased in after that. Georgia is not the first state to mandate…
Communications About Threats On Campus
BY MATTHEW BOEDY On April 8, our school had a gun incident that involved a student making threats against the campus. But this story isn’t about that scary situation. It’s about my school administration’s epic communications failure about the incident. Incidents like this show why principles of academic freedom and shared governance matter. It took…
Georgia Calls Us All to Act
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Here in Georgia in the last few days: Lawmakers failed to pass a bill to end DEI in student activities and programs in our public university system. The bill would have codified into law policy moves already done to erase DEI in the last year by our system administration. One of our…
The Two AAUPs
BY MATTHEW BOEDY In the past few days, as president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP, I have received two interesting comments from faculty in my state. The first was a plea to organize, rally, and protest more “to build collective strength.” The second was a plea to reform the AAUP because in the…
Higher Education Exile and Resilience
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Amid our new national situation that officially began this week I hope readers of this blog find useful two books published this month.Asking you to forgive the self-promotion, I note from the start that I have chapters in both. The first book is about exile, specifically in higher education. The collection of…
Thinking Out Loud About the Future
BY MATTHEW BOEDY My former classmate Phil Christman wrote a long essay at Plough about the future of higher education, the humanities, and his particular context as a lecturer at the University of Michigan. If you haven’t read it, I wanted to bring it to your attention because it’s great. I wanted to highlight the…