Brian C. Mitchell began his August posts with a look at a survey of higher-ed CFOs: Ultimately, it’s not the job of the CFO to find incremental solutions to systemic problems eating away at the financial sustainability of American higher education. Collaboration like that proposed by CFO’s in the recent survey is important. But it…
Hank Reichman’s first post of the month dealt with Foundation for Individual Rights in Education lawsuits against campus speech codes: FIRE’s mission and approach differ from those of the AAUP and we sometimes disagree. Nonetheless, often our concerns overlap, as was indicated in an enlightening session offered by FIRE staff members at AAUP’s recent Annual…
Janet D. Stemwedel started off June with an explanation as to why she can no longer donate to her alma mater: As a professor at San José State University, a teaching-focused institution in the California State University system, I am teaching a very different student population than Wellesley’s. Approximately half of our students are first-generation…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE One hundred years ago today, the AAUP was founded at an organizational meeting at the Chemists’ Club in New York. A committee of 33 professors, chaired by John Dewey, organized the meeting. Among the members of the committee were Harvard law professor Roscoe Pound and Stanford engineering professor Guido Marx. Arthur Lovejoy served…
A May Day reprinting of an article by Jack Rasmus concluded: That condition of the 100 million plus working families in America today, International Labor Day 2014, is as lamentable as the accelerating accrual of income and wealth by the 1% is disgusting. Of course, the two trends are not mutually exclusive but directly related.…
On December 12, Myles Udland reported the following in an article for Business Insider: “Consumer confidence is at an almost 8-year high. “On Friday, the University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer confidence reading for December came in at 93.8, the best reading since January 2007 and a complete blowout of expectations. “According to Paul Dales at Capital…
“April is the… ” nope, not going there! Michael DeCesare posted a letter from women faculty at Merrimack College to the president of the University of Southern Maine that includes this: We write to request that you rescind the cuts you have made to the fulltime faculty in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social…
[For the previous month, February, go here.] Hank Reichman began the month by considering the decline of shared governance at Ft. Lewis College, exemplified by a change in course structure in relation to creits: shared governance is the issue at FLC and it is an issue that should concern faculty everywhere. To be sure, the…
This review of the past year, month by month, started with January, found here. A guest post by Cecil Canton toward the beginning of the month describes the “cultural taxation” faced by faculty from underrepresented groups, “a way to describe the unique burden placed on ethnic minority faculty in carrying out our responsibility for service…
I received permission from Gregory Scholtz, Director, A.A.U.P. Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance, to release this letter: December 30, 2014 Dr. Phyllis Wise Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Swanlund Administration Building 601 East John Street Champaign, Illinois 61820 Dear Chancellor Wise: The approval and December 23 release by the UIUC Senate Committee…