POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In one of the most widely read posts that I have made to this blog, I collected videos and images that have attempted to provide visualizations of the enormous differences between a million, a billion, and a trillion dollars. These kinds of almost inconceivable numbers have already become a concern as…
POSTED BY JOAN W. SCOTT A group of academics is calling for a comprehensive policy for public higher education in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They are, rightly I think, suggesting that the various federal stimulus packages have not made higher education a central concern, nor have these packages addressed fundamental issues facing us. They…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted from Remaking the University, where it appeared as the third in a series, Our Converging Crises. For the first two installments in the series go here and here. Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, co-editor of Remaking the University, and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The Department of Education just distributed this press release. It appears to be a formal announcement of the monies that we have all been discussing for several weeks. It seems to suggest that those monies are just now being released–now that the initial $6.2 billion in direct aid to students has…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On February 24, the following item was posted to the blog of the Ohio Conference of AAUP: OSU Athletics No Longer the Exception to the Rule In October of last year, we published a blog post about how much Ohio universities were subsidizing their athletic programs during the 2017-18 academic year. We indicated…
BY JOHN K. WILSON MacMurray College in southern Illinois, which announced yesterday that it will be closing its doors in May after operating for 174 years, was the first college I ever attended. Well, sort of. It was a summer math camp for high school students, with the lure of receiving college credit for attendance.…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is Professor of History at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The labor action that began with the grade strike in Santa Cruz and has now spread throughout the [U]niversity [of California] has…
BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions…
BY MARIAH QUINN In the face of a devastating 41 percent reduction in state funding imposed by the governor, Alaska AAUP members are mobilizing to save their public university system. In an open letter to state legislators, AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum and Abel Bult-Ito, president of United Academics of the University of Alaska (AAUP/AFT), urged…
BY HANK REICHMAN The late UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr once famously quipped that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem. Another related saying attributed to him was his description…