BY HANK REICHMAN Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest of all American scholars and intellectuals. To commemorate the occasion and explore the lessons of DuBois’s life and work for our time, the always thought-provoking Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society has…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a petition to the Higher Learning Commission signed by elected officials and community leaders from across Indiana and the Midwest, joined by thousands of faculty members and students at colleges and universities across Indiana and the Midwest. The petition calls on the Commission to reject…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN For the past few years Wisconsin has been ground zero in the fight over the future of public higher education. The AAUP, along with the Wisconsin AFT, has condemned a series of actions taken by Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin state legislature, and the University of Wisconsin system board of regents in…
JANUARY 14 PROPOSAL DEADLINE: In the past year, free speech on campuses has become a focus of contentious debate and increased media scrutiny. Campus communities—including administrators, faculty, and students—generally embrace the concept of free speech yet lack a clear consensus about its limits. The AAUP invites proposals for presentations at its annual conference on the state…
BY HANK REICHMAN Leaders of the City University of New York Professional Staff Congress, a joint affiliate of the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers, and the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT were among fifteen people arrested yesterday at a demonstration in New York protesting the Wall Street funders of the Republican Tax Bill, approved later…
BY HANK REICHMAN This summer the North Carolina Restore Campus Free Speech Act, passed earlier in the year by the state legislature, went into effect. Directly inspired by a proposal by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, the legislation’s premise is that free speech is under attack on American campuses. Among other provisions, the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has joined with 36 other higher education organizations in urging Congress to slow down its reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to allow the consequences of its provisions to be understood and revised as necessary. After several years of inaction, the bill is suddenly being rushed through committee with…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Below is the text of an open letter signed by 135 members of the University of Nebraska faculty expressing concern that “decisions involving the future of the University are being made without transparency or proper governance and under improper exertions of influence by the legislative and executive branches of the state…
BY LESLIE BARY Guest blogger Leslie Bary is District V Representative to the National Council of the AAUP and Secretary, Louisiana Conference. She teaches Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Louisiana. During the recent meeting of National Council of the AAUP I thought about quitting. The national leadership is obviously not interested in…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is reposted with permission from the website of the Colorado state conference of the AAUP. Despite that the symposium gods burdened Boulder with an inevitable spring blizzard, the AAUP Academic Freedom Symposium at CU-Boulder on April 29th was inspiring and memorable. The melodramatic weather could not discourage participants or…