BY JENNIFER RUTH Yesterday, the AAUP announced the release of Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System. The fifty-three page report represents almost a year’s worth of work by dedicated staff and volunteer leaders and incisively lays out the ramifications of political interference for the survival of basic AAUP principles of…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Two recent major surveys on public opinion about higher education offer differing details but the same dark picture of public opinion about higher education. They also offer the same roadmap for faculty advocacy to reverse that dangerous trend. First, there was a Chronicle of Higher Education survey in early September. The Chronicle…
BY ANDREW J. DOUGLAS Reposted from the Morehouse Newsroom with permission from the author. Once upon a time a Morehouse professor tried to unionize the faculty. Walter Chivers, the current namesake of the school’s cafeteria, was a professor of sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 until his retirement in 1968. He was also a labor…
BY FRANK E. RITTER AND DONALD A. DONAHUE COVID-19 has disappeared from the headlines, but not from our lives or classes. What steps should we take this fall? We note thirteen. COVID-19 has been declared as endemic, necessitating continuing precautions like those taken against influenza. Campuses continue to be places of increased risk for communicable…
BY MARYBETH GASMAN Faculty are at the core of undoing systemic racism in faculty hiring. Within research universities—specifically those that are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU)—there are two factors that are most likely to determine who becomes a tenure-track faculty member. First, the institution a faculty candidate attends for their PhD and,…
BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s biennial meeting last month I had occasion to pick up a copy of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education, by UC Berkeley education professor John Aubrey Douglass and a group of other contributors. The book is a collection of essays treating the impact on…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In February, historian Ellen Schrecker and I called upon faculty to use the power we possess through shared governance to fight the education gag orders sweeping the country. In January, I commented here on how institutions in the south hesitate to pass resolutions out of fear of “poking the bear.” I am…
BY HANK REICHMAN Despite ongoing and lively debate among scholars of the region about the nature and histories of Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, the origins and causes of the current crisis, and the appropriate role for the US and its allies in the conflict, a remarkable unanimity has emerged among scholarly organizations in Russian and…
BY ALICE BROWN Read the first in the series, “Who Cares about Small Colleges?” COVID-19 has reduced the autonomy faculty once had to choose their course content and teaching methods. Colleges across the country have reduced retirement benefits, sabbaticals, and tenure appointments to help balance budgets. Faculty are told whether to teach in person or…
BY MARY ELLEN FLANNERY The following is reposted with permission from NEA Today. Mary Ellen Flannery is senior writer at the National Education Association. Fifty years ago, a Florida state legislative committee sought to identify, interrogate, and purge gay schoolteachers and university faculty. With subpoena powers and a network of informants, state legislators used uniformed…