2026 Faculty in the South Survey
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Please share widely. Faculty in the South Colleague: That’s you in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Georgia conference of the American Association of University Professors and its partners in states across the South would like to know your opinion as a…
The Hidden Costs of Productivity Theater in Higher Education
BY MICHAEL LaGIER Lights, camera, action. In more and more workplaces, leaders unintentionally reward visible busyness over meaningful results, a dynamic often called productivity theater, a term popularized by organizational psychologist Adam Grant. In colleges and universities, this phenomenon can be especially damaging. When faculty and staff are evaluated primarily on how much they appear…
How Academic Freedom Committees Can Help Our Universities Find Their Spines
BY KATIE RAINWATER AND MARTHA SCHOOLMAN University administrations in red states (including Texas and Florida) are increasingly using vague statutes and oral directives to pressure faculty to trade away their academic freedom. In Florida, departments in at least two universities—including Florida International University, where we both teach—recently adopted a censored Introduction to Sociology textbook and…
The New McCarthyism at the MIT Chapter of AAUP
BY MICHEL DEGRAFF Editor’s note: This post was originally published on the afternoon of Friday, January 30, 2026, then unpublished to provide time for AAUP staff to consult about its accordance with an editorial policy that states, “Posts should not focus primarily on specific ongoing disputes involving individuals and their colleges or universities or AAUP…
OU Community Needs to Live Well to “Live On”
BY OU-AAUP Two recent incidents put the University of Oklahoma (OU) in the forefront of national and international news. On November 22, ICE detained Vahid Abedini, Professor of Iranian Studies at OU and H-1 B visa holder, as he was boarding his flight from Oklahoma City to attend a conference on Middle Eastern Studies in…
The New AAUP-MESA Report on Our Moment’s Campus Repression
BY DANIEL SEGAL It is the rare faculty member who today is unaware of the significant increase in attacks on speech rights and academic freedom protections on U.S. campuses over the past two years. A recently released joint report from the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) provides an important and illuminating framework…
The Eternal Synergy of the Spotless Mind
BY ADAM RZEPKA A large public university is wiping out all of its humanities departments. It isn’t sure why. As I write this, our Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS)—a newly hired computer scientist who will soon be both Interim Dean and Interim Provost—is telling faculty and staff at the…
Fighting MAGA McCarthyism: Interviewing Tom Alter
BY BILL MULLEN Can you identify yourself and explain what happened at Texas State? My name is Tom Alter. Until being recently fired in violation of my free speech rights, I was a tenured associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos, specializing in labor and working class forms of organizing and…
Journal of Academic Freedom Explores the Intersection of Philanthropy and Academic Freedom
POSTED BY THE AAUP We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 16 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Our call for papers, “Philanthropy and Academic Freedom,” invited scholarly articles that address the impact of large private donations on academic freedom and the educational mission of colleges and universities at a time when fiscal…