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…
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell wants to be a reverse-Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to give to the rich and forcing public colleges to obey his terrible ideas. Gov. McDonnell is proposing that public colleges should not be allowed to increase the revenue allocated from tuition funds for financial aid to help the poor. According…
By John Hinshaw Professors are often told that higher education should be run more like a business. You might think that I, as the President of the Pennsylvania AAUP, would disagree. But you’d be wrong. Look, even the AAUP is aware that higher ed has to change, and what could be better or more efficient…
The humanities have more to lose in the current budget wars than either the sciences or technical fields, says AAUP president Cary Nelson, in “Fighting for the Humanities,” just out in the new issue of Academe (the full issue will be released next week). This is because people take it for granted that scientific knowledge…
In the new issue of Academe, Bruce Burgett argues that for public universities in states like Washington, the temptation to privatize is becoming overwhelming. He writes: Given the rise of market-based models in educational policy circles, the threat of the current moment is that the economic stress public institutions are experiencing will lead them to…