BY STEVE MUMME AND CAPRICE LAWLESS This op-ed appeared originally in the Boulder Daily Camera [openforum@dailycamera.com]. It’s indicative of the dire state in which Colorado’s Community College System adjunct instructors now labor that the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado branch launched a Christmas season GoFundMe campaign to help tide them through the annual…
BY JOERG TIEDE The AAUP released a report on the dismissal of Jane Harty, a part-time faculty member with forty years of service in the Department of Music at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU). The report found that the PLU administration had acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure when…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over two years ago, on November 3, 2017, I posted an item to this blog about the ordeal of Georgette Fleischer, a Barnard College adjunct writing instructor who was summarily dismissed from her position after 17 years of successful teaching. Here, from that post, is the background: For seventeen years Georgette Fleischer…
BY HANK REICHMAN In my October Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture at the University of Michigan I argued that “the gravest challenge to academic freedom, one that exacerbates all others, [is] the steady erosion of the tenure system and the concomitant and explosive expansion of contingent, frequently part-time faculty employment,” what some have labeled “adjunctification.” Part-time…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday I posted a piece about the outsourcing of work in the University of California (UC) and a pending strike by members of AFSCME, the union representing many staff employees at the university. But UC Berkeley sociology professor Michael Burawoy has reminded me (and others) that UC’s non-tenure-track lecturers, represented by the…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Dirty Laundry Week. Tuition Scam Week. Fraud on the Public Week. Tuition Lies Week. Perhaps if national Campus Equity Week had a more descriptive title, it might get the attention of journalists and lawmakers. As it is, October 21–25, 2019 will pass as another week for the nation’s 5,300 wealthy college administrators…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY It’s Campus Equity Week, a week of action from October 21 to 25 when faculty, students, and other advocates on campuses around the country are calling attention to the increasingly precarious nature of academic employment and its negative implications for higher education. Guest blogger Carolyn Betensky focuses here on obstacles to research…
BY TOM DISCENNA AND AMY POLLARD Through no fault of the AAUP, its slogan “One Hundred Years, One Faculty” is too often belied in practice. The effect of state labor law, historical exigencies, and deeply entrenched attitudes has meant that in many places tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty are organized in separate unions. In…
BY AARON BARLOW Is Liberty University the future of the American university? Most of us have dismissed Liberty as an outlier. Though an accredited university, Liberty’s focus has always been education through religion rather than, as traditional American religious colleges and universities have it, religion through education. Its leaders have not the confidence in their…