BY ADRIANNA KEZAR, JOHN W. CURTIS, EMILY KOREN, AND KC CULVER The answer to the question our title poses is not very much—yet. There are serious challenges facing higher education in the United States today, from efforts to restrict teaching “uncomfortable” subjects to new and repeated attacks on tenure and the persistent underfunding of colleges,…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In “Rutgers Unions Prepare to Surf the Strike Wave,” Hank Kalet wrote for the blog about the authorization-to-strike vote to be held at Rutgers. The vote was held and 94 percent of Rutgers AAUP-AFT members voted “yes.” Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway has been using scare tactics to intimidate the Rutgers community. In…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN During the recent landmark strike by some 48,000 graduate student employees in the University of California system, many Senate (tenure-track) faculty members chose to honor picket lines in various ways. Such sympathy actions are legal, but employers are entitled under the law to dock the pay of anyone who does not…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…
BY RACHEL WHEELER For my sanity, I’ve had to cut back on my doom-scrolling habit and limit my time on Twitter. But there’s one type of content I’m totally there for: over the course of spring semester—our fifth pandemic semester—as more faculty ventured back into physical classrooms and back to in-person conferences and lectures, what…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK The winter issue of Academe explores how the pandemic has changed faculty organizing and engendered new kinds of solidarity. The articles offer snapshots of the recent work of AAUP chapters around the country, provide templates for expanding the faculty’s influence on campus, and draw out lessons that chapters can carry forward into…
BY ALICE BROWN One of the first articles published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2022 asked, “Who Wants to Be a College President?” Author Eric Kelderman writes that recent changes in higher education have led to a shift in the qualities boards seek in a new president. One change he describes is that…
BY MARY ELLEN JUNDA, JEFFREY OGBAR, AND MICHAEL BAILEY Mandatory Vaccination Policy The global COVID-19 pandemic has affected all facets of our world in a range of ways. Higher education was forced to fundamentally shift over the last year and a half, making many campuses empty of students, staff and faculty, while we pivoted to…
BY DONNA MURCH Tonight Rutgers AAUP-AFT will hold the first session of a new initiative we’ve been working on for months. In the tradition of Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the 1960s civil rights movement, we are setting up a Freedom School for political education and outreach. Our first event on Thursday,…