BY CAROLYN BETENSKY I’ve been spending the past two weeks speaking with colleagues who teach at public and private colleges and universities in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas. All of these states are led by governors or legislatures that have demonstrated varying degrees of hostility to protective policies against the spread of COVID. To…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This news release is from the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron: The University of Akron Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (Akron-AAUP) has created a one-time donation fund, the “Akron-AAUP Faculty Care Fund”. The fund is an act of support for the 66 University of Akron (UA)…
BY RICHARD J. REDDICK AND LISA L. MOORE “Have you gotten the shot?” It’s springtime, and those of us in higher education are beginning to cautiously imagine some kind of return to campus later this year. Many are calling not for a return to “normal” but to a revisioning of our habits, assumptions, and structures—many…
POSTED BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The statement was written by Don Eron, a retired Senior Instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder and former member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. It was approved by the Executive Committee of the Colorado Conference on February 8, 2021. On January 22, 2021, the University…
BY JANET BOWDAN Here in Massachusetts, my university just posted a coronavirus update that notes, in passing, that “higher education is not part of Phase I and II of the vaccination plan.” Wait. Why aren’t higher education faculty and staff at least in Phase II? Obviously (at least to me), health care workers and first…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Northwestern University professors Jackie Stevens and Jorge Coronado, two officers of the Northwestern AAUP chapter, have an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times today titled “Hey, Northwestern students, choose your own grade point average!” The article criticizes a new Northwestern University policy adopted by the administration during the pandemic. As faculty members…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today (October 19) by the board of the University of California (UC) Berkeley Faculty Association. The University We Are For State support for public higher education in California has declined for decades: it constituted approximately one-third of the UC budget in 1990 and is about 10…
BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On August 31, Illinois Wesleyan University announced that three tenured faculty would be given one-year terminal contracts and then fired because of controversial plans to discontinue academic programs in anthropology, French, Italian, and religious studies while expanding programs in economics and business. The AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance…
BY EDWIN BATTISTELLA Like many universities, mine has an annual faculty report, which goes to the chair, the division director, and the provost. Today, the reports are electronic rather than typed, but during the nearly four decades I have taught at various universities, the basic categories in the reports have remained: teaching, scholarship, and service.…