BY HANK REICHMAN In the fall of 2016 the AAUP, the College Media Association, the Student Press Law Center, and the National Coalition Against Censorship issued a report, Threats to the Independence of Student Media. The report declared, “Candid journalism that discusses students’ dissatisfaction with the perceived shortcomings of their institutions can be uncomfortable for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a news release from the Wright State Office of Communications: Wright State University announced Nov. 16 that it has reached an agreement with the federal government to resolve questions and problems that arose when former university employees mishandled H-1B visa applications. The Wright State University Board of Trustees…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Alexandra Hutzler for Newsweek: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s security detail, one of the most extensive in the Trump administration, will cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $20 million through the fall of 2019. DeVos began receiving nonstop security from the U.S. Marshals Service…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Vox, Sean Illing interviews Joshua Hunt, a reporter for the New York Times and author of University of Nike. These are the opening paragraphs to the article, which provide the background to the book and the interview: In 2014, the New York Times sent an investigative reporter to the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Please sign a petition of support for our chapter’s efforts to get a fair contract: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stand-with-wright-state-faculty. In voting that ended at 5 pm on Noember 7, members of AAUP-WSU voted overwhelmingly to reject the Fact Finder’s report: 467 voted to reject, 12 to accept. Over 97% of the voters rejected the…
BY MONICA OWENS In support of the launch of our national Education Not Privatization campaign this week we interviewed David Hughes, vice president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers University to learn more about how the Rutgers chapter successfully organized to defend academic freedom and exercised oversight of online offerings in the Rutgers-Pearson eCollege contract.…
BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
BY LESLIE BARY Yesterday a public official, dropping the name of the Lumina Foundation, asked Louisiana faculty for ideas on how to innovate. Did we need help learning to use technology? Would mini-grants help us find new books to replace the outdated ones we might be using? Perhaps we do not need books, but teaching…
BY BILL MULLEN WITH “LISA BARRISTER” In May of 2017, Purdue University announced that it had purchased Kaplan University, an on-line University, with the intention to turn it into a part of Purdue University. Since that time, Kaplan has been renamed Purdue Global University, and has already graduated its first group of students. Criticism of…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of the AAUP’s recent disclosure that Purdue University Global — the totally online entity created when Purdue, ignoring protests by faculty and community leaders, acquired for-profit Kaplan University (see my previous post here)— is requiring its instructional faculty to accept a restrictive non-disclosure agreement, the Century Foundation,a progressive, nonpartisan…