BY MATTHEW BOEDY Two recent major surveys on public opinion about higher education offer differing details but the same dark picture of public opinion about higher education. They also offer the same roadmap for faculty advocacy to reverse that dangerous trend. First, there was a Chronicle of Higher Education survey in early September. The Chronicle…
BY HANK REICHMAN As higher education reels from continuing assaults on academic freedom, tenure, shared governance and education itself in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, we now face the possibility that another state’s major flagship institution may soon exist only as a shadow of its former self, the victim of a…
BY APARAJITA DE As the sixth poorest state in the nation, West Virginia has always identified a large part of its working-class (primarily) white population as coal miners. With the steady downgrading of coal and related industries, the working class’s only way out of poverty and into alternative livelihoods seemed to be housed in the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 15, Medaille University in Buffalo, New York (until last summer, Medaille College) announced that it will cease operations and close after 148 years on August 31. The announcement came less than a week after neighboring Trocaire College informed Medaille it would pull out of an agreement to purchase the school,…
BY HANK REICHMAN The recently released preliminary report of the AAUP’s special committee to review an apparent pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida, which I am co-chairing, concludes that “academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically…
BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER It makes sense for an administrator to be sued in court for violating the law. As a suit proceeds against University of Colorado Colorado Springs chancellor Venkat Reddy, charged with violating the civil rights of an employee, there has been no word from campus officials. It also makes sense for a university…
BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER Once upon a time, the administration of a sleepy state university proposed a new budget, offering the rationale that the new budget would “incentivize” departments and promote “entrepreneurial” conduct—couching it in terms of “decentralized” operations and rewarding colleges for increases in their student full-time equivalent enrollments. Three years into the proposed experiment…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The strike continues with no end in sight. Although there have been tentative agreements concerning post-docs and academic researchers, in the academic student employee (ASE) and student researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues. This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Fall 2022 | Vol. 108, No. 4 The fall 2022 issue of Academe calls on faculty to become actively engaged in budget and finance issues on their campuses and in their states. Contributors to the issue explore the power of coalitional organizing to push back against austerity measures, demand transparency, and hold institutions…
BY JANE S. GABIN Many have read the Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest survey of public university presidents’ salaries and are appropriately horrified: sixteen presidents make over $1 million a year. This underlines the overall problem with US higher education: too many people are making too much money. Higher education in the United States has…