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 Would mini-grants help us find new books to replace the outdated ones we might be using?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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements are much in the news these days. Most notably, the “aggressive and unconventional” use of such agreements by the Trump White House has attracted attention because, as the Washington Post pointed out, “most legal experts believe such agreements are not legally enforceable for public employees.” In this context…
POSTED BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM The Rider University AAUP chapter is circulating a petition calling on the Rider board of trustees to stop the university’s proposed sale of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, to Kaiwen, a Chinese for-profit company with no experience in higher education. The costly negotiations for the deal, which is detrimental…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This update is from Ralph Wilson: The Charles Koch Foundation changed their donor habits as a result of the pressure we’ve applied while exposing their strategy for undue donor influence. The Wall Street Journal just published an article “Charles Koch Foundation to Publish Future University Grant Agreements” wherein it was announced…