Reich: "Public Higher Education is Dying in the U.S."

BY HANK REICHMAN Public higher education is “dying” in the US, with the pricing out of students from poorer backgrounds amounting to a “national tragedy in the making.”  So warned Robert Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and secretary of labor in the Bill Clinton administration, in a…

NYU's Version of Trump University?

BY HANK REICHMAN Very few academics were much surprised when it turned out that Donald Trump’s highly advertised “Trump University” turned out to be nothing more than a sleazy scam.  After all, in some respects Trump’s con was not much different from that engaged in by too many other for-profit “educational” institutions, except, perhaps, that…

UC Faculty Defend Public Education

BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted to this blog “A Statement of Principles for Choosing New University of California Chancellors,” issued by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization.  Yesterday, at UC Berkeley, where more than a dozen students, faculty, staff, alumni and foundation representatives serving on the…

Who Counts As an "Educator"?

BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.”  The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…

The Political Divide in the Perception of Higher Ed

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is a chart summarizing a recent Pew Research survey on how political ideology affects the perception of American institutions: The complete survey, including a link to a detailed breakdown of the results in PDF, can be found at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/from-universities-to-churches-republicans-and-democrats-differ-in-views-of-major-institutions/ Education Dive has provided the following “highlights” of and “insights” about…

Read the New Journal of Academic Freedom

BY KELLY HAND We’re pleased to announce that the new volume of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom is out today. The Journal publishes scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Current and past volumes of the Journal of Academic Freedom, which receives funding from the AAUP Foundation,…

Saint Xavier University Adjuncts Vote for Union

BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN In 2011, Saint Xavier University adjunct faculty voted to organize under the banner of the Illinois Education Association. President Christine Wiseman challenged the right of adjunct faculty at the Sisters of Mercy Catholic institution to unionize, in claiming a religious exemption under the First Amendment. Federal labour law, they argued, should not apply to…