POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows are the opening paragraphs of a news report for the Associated Press written by Matthew Barakat: Virginia’s largest public university granted the conservative Charles Koch Foundation a say in the hiring and firing of professors in exchange for millions of dollars in donations, according to newly released documents. The…
BY HANK REICHMAN In February, George Mason University students filed a lawsuit against their school and its fundraising arm, the George Mason University Foundation, in hopes of obtaining grant and gift agreements between private donors and the Foundation. Transparent GMU, the student organization that filed the suit, is worried about the potential for private donors…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik has reported on how an “Unusual Donor Agreement at UNLV Raises Questions about Fund-Raising and Governance”: Len Jessup is on his way out as president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, after receiving unfavorable reviews from the system chancellor and clashing with…
GUEST POST BY JULIA K. GRUBER I am a professor and AAUP chapter president at Tennessee Technological University, the institution that has recently been in the news for its collaboration with the glider kit “Zombie truck” producing company Fitzgerald. The situation escalated last week, when four professors (myself included) received a rather threatening letter from…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The title of this post comes from an op-ed written by Michael A. MacDowell, President Emeritus of Misericordia University and managing director of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, for the March 18 edition of the Naples News in Florida. The foundation was created in 1947 by the founder of the candy…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for Business Insider, Alan Dawson has provided a ranking of the 30 stadiums with the largest crowd capacity. If there were any doubt that major college football is primarily a big business and is skewed to the biggest programs in the five largest conferences, this list should put it…
BY MARK HULSETHER Guest blogger, Mark Hulsether, a professor in the department of religious studies at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, originally published this essay on his blog, MBE: Mark’s Blogging Experiment, on March 4. We are posting it here with his permission. The first post in this series of two blog posts is available here. I…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Below is the text of an email from AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum and AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress chair Paul Davis sent on February 27 following the February 26 oral arguments at the US Supreme Court in the case of Janus v. AFSCME. Dear Colleague, Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Two Items from Ohio This is a summary of the findings in a report by Policy Matters Ohio on student debt in in the state: –Ohioans have higher rates of indebtedness and default than residents of other states. –People of color, women, low-income people and seniors struggle most with debt. Loan…
BY AARON BARLOW In the November 2017 issue of Australian Humanities Review, in an article entitled “The Roz Ward Case: Relections on Social Media, University Management and Free Speech,” Binoy Kampmark, a a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, writes of the situation of…