BY JOHN K. WILSON On October 22, I testified as an expert witness on academic freedom at a hearing to dismiss Lars Jensen, a tenured math professor at Truckee Meadow Community College (TMCC) in Nevada. Because I wasn’t able to make my full argument about Jensen’s case (the attorney for the administration opposed my testimony,…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE On October 14, the AAUP released its third report on data collected from this year’s Shared Governance Survey as part of a special issue of Academe dedicated to governance. This report focuses on responses to questions about the composition of senates and similar faculty governance bodies and the conduct of presidential searches, as well as findings…
BY THE AAUP Fall 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 4 The fall 2021 issue of Academe surveys the present state of academic governance. It includes a new report on findings of the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, firsthand accounts of governance struggles on campuses around the country, and a pair of articles that confront the threat posed…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF AND S. ANI MUKHERJI We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 12 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. As coeditors, we agreed on the theme for the volume, “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity,” late last summer—a time of cascading loss and despair, but also of inspiring…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE It’s a mixed picture when it comes to shared governance faculty roles in decision-making areas at four-year institutions of higher education. Today we released a second report on data collected from the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, the first national survey on shared governance since 2001. Key findings include: In several areas in…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS We in the Colorado Conference asked ourselves a few questions as the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine began to lift. Could we create a midsummer event requiring just a few hundred miles of driving that would bring together AAUP members from half a dozen cities? Could we link up, via satellite, to the AAUP…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago, proposes institutionalizing academic freedom in an opinion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education this past week: “Colleges must institutionalize the protection of academic freedom by devoting resources to training, establishing standards, and hearing complaints when norms are threatened.” According to Ginsburg,…
BY MATTHEW FINKIN The following is a remembrance by Matthew Finkin of Marty Lapidus, who died on May 27 at the age of eighty. It was 1968. I was the Association’s staff counsel in Washington, DC. Marty Lapidus was a staff assistant to the president of TIAA in New York City. The AAUP represented the…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK Spring 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 2 The spring 2021 issue of Academe builds on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education launched earlier this year by the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and other allies. Contributors to the issue respond to the crisis now confronting higher education, calling for bold…
BY KEVIN L. COPE, Treasurer, Louisiana Conference of the AAUP Whether in William Herschel’s telescopic glimpses of stars, Shakespeare’s character Hamlet’s decision to unravel the state of Denmark, or the votes of faculty senates on their legislative measures, resolution tends to occur quickly, within a fleeting instant. Few stopwatches are fast enough to measure that…