California Faculty, Teachers, and Allied Labor Groups Unify in Opposition to California Senate Bill 520, an Attempt to Mandate Legislatively the Privatization of the Curriculum

This letter has been endorsed by the following faculty groups: the California Faculty Association, the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, the California Community College Independents, the California Federation of Teachers, the California Teachers Association, the California School Employees Association, the California Labor Federation, SEIU California, and USW 5810. April 18, 2013 The Honorable Darrell…

The Saga of the Survey at Saint Louis U

By Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years and is president of the SLU AAUP chapter. This is another chapter in the unfolding story of Saint Louis University, the struggle between the President and the faculty. When last we’d left our intrepid crew…

Ward Churchill’s Last Appeal

The US Supreme Court has rejected Ward Churchill’s final appeal of his firing by the University of Colorado, and an ugly chapter in the history of academic freedom will now be left to the history books rather than the courts.

Millersville U Commencement Speaker Controversy: It’s About Self-Respect

“An example I came up with: A guy stabs another guy and then the victim is in the hospital. The guy who stabs him comes to the victim’s bedside with the victim’s family, just to tell him everything is going to be alright. That’s how I am feeling.” Kyle D. Johnson Millersville University Student Class of 2013 [POST…

The Persistence of Crisis: Work Harder or Fight Back

At my monthly department meeting yesterday, the department’s representative to our University Senate gave his report on their last meeting. As part of his report, he told us some of the concerns our university president, Javier Cevallos, expressed about a recent drop in enrollment. Cevallos’s remarks before our University Senate echoed a statement he released…

3/18/13 is a pretty huge day @ Writing Commons thanks to the Duke MOOC!

In past blogs, I’ve chronicled the development of Writing Commons, the Open Education Home for Writers, with hopes that my experiences developing an Open Education Resource (OER) might be of interest to faculty across the disciplines. I’ve argued that faculty might want to consider contributing to Writing Commons or other OERs that are peer-reviewed, that…

Despair in the Open Education World

Thus far, 2013 has been a tough year for open-education advocates. As Flat World Knowledge promised at the tail-end of 2012, the publisher no longer provides a CC 3.0 NC SA version of its textbooks for students. In response, Leslie Scott endeavored to defend the commons by crowd-sourcing an effort to harvest Flat World Knowledge’s catalog…

New AAUP Report on Financial Exigency

The AAUP has just issued a new report on “The Role of the Faculty in Conditions of Financial Exigency.” The report “insists that faculty members must be involved in consultation and deliberation at every stage of the process, beginning with a determination that a state of financial exigency exists.” According to the report, “Financial exigency…

AAUP Report on University of Northern Iowa

The AAUP has issued a report on the University of Northern Iowa (pdf), finding that the university had “no legitimate basis, financial or otherwise” to terminate faculty appointments and failed to follow its own policies. UNI president Ben Allen has issued a response to the AAUP report. You can read coverage of the report in…

The Nature of Faculty Representation – Against Confidentiality

This week, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released a draft statement, entitled “Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance”, which in part originated with the following presentation that I have given at several state conference meetings over the past year. A couple of years ago, I served as chair of a committee…

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