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What Retrenchment Taught Me About Staying

BY RACHEL BOUVIER Act I: Collateral Damage The letter came by FedEx. Inside: A formal notification that my tenured position as an economics professor had been eliminated—the second time in a matter of months my line had been retrenched, along with fifty colleagues and entire departments. The first had been noisy and public. The second…

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2025 Faculty in the South Survey

BY MATTHEW BOEDY Faculty in the South Describe a Climate of Fear on Campus, Grants Cancelled, and Students Impacted, Survey Finds A major new survey of higher education faculty across the South has revealed the significant impact of federal and state political attacks on faculty work and recruitment. The survey, conducted by multiple state conferences…

Free Jonathan Caravello!

BY HANK REICHMAN Dr. Jonathan Caravello, a lecturer in mathematics and philosophy at California State University, Channel Islands, was beaten and arrested on Thursday, July 10, in an ICE raid on a legal cannabis farm in Camarillo, California, that also resulted in the death of a worker who fell from a roof while fleeing immigration…

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Late to the Party

BY ZOE SHERMAN I tried not to be a professional academic. But I loved being a student so much, and I felt such a strong pull toward scholarship that eventually I overcame my qualms about getting my livelihood tangled up with my intellectual passions. In the fall of 2009, at the age of thirty, with…

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Fighting on Three Fronts

BY HANK REICHMAN The all-but-finalized departure of University of Michigan President Santa Ono for the same, yet even more lucrative, position at the University of Florida, where his apparent hostility to student protest (even when expressed via democratic referendum) and eagerness to abandon DEI programs made him an ideal candidate to serve Governor Ron DeSantis,…

Announcing the New Redbook

BY THE AAUP We are excited to announce the publication today of the AAUP’s Policy Documents and Reports, known as the Redbook. It’s an indispensable resource for promoting sound academic practices on your campus. Bringing together foundational statements on academic freedom, shared governance, and other essential topics with new and revised documents—many with statistical or…