The Ohio Conference of AAUP (OCAAUP) has joined such groups as the Ohio Education Association (OEA), Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT), New Faculty Majority (NFM), Ohio Part-Time Faculty Association (OPTFA), and Ohio Student Association (OSA) in forming a statewide advocacy group on issues related to higher education. After taking some time to create an operating…
The following statement was released today by the Steering Committee of AAUP’s California Conference: The California Conference of the American Association of University Professors (CA-AAUP) endorses Assembly Bill 2705. The bill changes terms used by the California Education Code to describe the hard-working professional educators who now teach the majority of our community college students.…
Author’s Note: A version of this post was publish on Raging Chicken Press under the title, “Slow Train to Destruction of Public Higher Ed in PA?: Defund then Divide-and-Conquer,” on Saturday, Feb. 22. If the fall 2013 semester saw the term “retrenchment” – the elimination of faculty, programs, and jobs – become part of daily…
February 18, 2014 At the 2013 convention in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO reaffirmed its historical commitment to increasing access to post-secondary education and alleviating the financial burden that now too often is part of that education. Accordingly, we call on federal and state policymakers to make post-secondary training and education more accessible by ending the…
This series will review the employment data for U.S. colleges and universities from 2004 to 2012. That data has been measured against enrollment, by the percentage increase in each category per 1,000 students at the institution. The five categories are: full-time faculty, part-time faculty, upper administration, professional staff, and non-professional staff (with the last three…
The title of this post is another one of those entrenched but hackneyed questions that obscures the real issues in higher education. The often-heard claim that federal mandates have necessitated the proliferation of administrators makes little sense on several levels. First, and most basically, why should keeping data, etc., on what are essentially secondary, if…
When I was entering graduate school in 1978, there were 29 new Ph.D.’s for every tenure-track job opening in English. It was the period in which anecdotes about Ph.D.’s driving taxi cabs became commonplace. I didn’t know that information at the time, but it became very apparent as I made my way through the Masters…
If American higher education is going to continue to aspire to excellence, its institutions need to address and reverse the growing reliance on adjuncts as teachers. Not only is this exploitative of the adjuncts (to say nothing of the students), but it reduces our colleges and universities to factories, effectively excluding academic freedom and removing…
I’ve enjoyed this video in support of legislation for equal compensation for all faculty in Colorado’s community colleges and asked colleague Don Eron to write about it. Don is a faculty member at UC Boulder, a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and a leader in the Colorado AAUP conference.…
Though she is perhaps best known for her 1966 skewering of LBJ, MacBird, perhaps all of us should be paying a little more attention to Barbara Garson today. Her book Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live should be out in paperback any day now. Here’s what Adam Hochschild says about it: Garson knows that the hard…