I’m a historian, blogger and longtime AAUP member who’s delighted to have the opportunity to post here from time to time on the kinds of issues that concern Academe readers. While I started off blogging about history, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time at my home blog in the last year or so writing…
This is a guest post by Donna Potts, chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences and a professor of English at Kansas State University. On May 24, when the president of the University of Missouri, Tim Wolfe, announced plans to close the University of Missouri Press, my first reaction was deeply personal. I immediately…
This is a guest post by Lenore Beaky, a member of the AAUP Committee on Community Colleges. “Santa Monica College—The Shape of Things to Come, or The Future That’s Already Arrived?” What happened at Santa Monica College this spring embodies many of the most urgent threats and challenges facing community colleges in the United States now: vanishing…
North Carolina multimillionaire Arthur Pope has been using his wealth to influence the state’s politics and policy for years. In the May-June issue of Academe, Hassan Melehy, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains how Pope uses his wealth to fund foundations which push for more and more conservative influence over education. On the one hand,…
As we all know, universities around the country are in financial trouble. Many states have been cutting funding to their public universities, forcing the schools to do more with less. So it’s understandable that administrators would be on the lookout for new sources of funding—including wealthy donors. In “Fine Print, Restrictive Grants, and Academic Freedom,”…
How much influence should wealthy donors be able to buy? Kevin Kumashiro looks at the question is “When Billionaires Become Educational Experts,” in the May-June issue of Academe. Kumashiro examines the history of two groups, the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Business Roundtable, which have had outsized influence in education policy from their founding in the…
When does philanthropy cross the line? That’s the question we are looking at in the newest issue of Academe, now posted online. Over the next few days, I’ll be highlighting a few of the feature articles, but before I do, I wanted to talk about the issue as a whole, because I think it’s a particularly good…
Before departing for their two week break, Michigan’s House Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education issued a group of policy recommendations tied to new funding. One recommendation in particular, tries to force public universities to sell their academic freedom or risk losing new state money. Section 273a threatens the state appropriations of any Michigan public university…
The Center for the Future of Higher Education—the “virtual think tank” of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education—has released its first report, Closing the Door, Increasing the Gap: Who’s not going to (community) college. It’s written by Gary Rhoades, former general secretary of the AAUP, and in the report, Rhoadesexplains that more than…
The following guest post is by Jean-Louis Hippolyte, an Associate Professor of French and Director of the European Studies program at Rutgers University-Camden. “Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us, to the end, dare…