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.…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On June 19th, 2020, University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer and Provost Ka Yee C. Lee sent an email to the University community on the occasion of Juneteenth inviting the University and its members to use the day to “learn and listen, to examine history, to challenge assumptions, and to explore…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When it became increasingly obvious to me and my colleagues in Georgia through campus town halls and meetings that our university system would not institute a mask mandate for all during our upcoming fall semester, our AAUP chapter grew concerned. The why of that decision is surely political, since Georgia is a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter expressing the concerns of around a dozen Assistant Professors from the Faculty Organizing Group (FOG) at University of California at Santa Cruz is reposted from Remaking the University. For a previous statement on this topic from 176 UCSC faculty members go here. The authors would like to…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from Remaking the University. Michael Meranze is Professor of History and Chair of the Academic Senate at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. COVID-19 has brutally laid bare the devastating impact of several decades of privatization and capitalist globalization.…
BY DAVID G. EMBRICK AND JOHNNY E. WILLIAMS While Israel is actively erasing Palestinians’ land, livelihoods, stories, personhoods, and histories, the United States is providing Israel with funding, technical assistance, hardware, and even language to carry out its ongoing brutal and violent absorption of Palestine into Israel. Though this violation of international law is widely…
BY AARON BARLOW What the Eric Rasmusen situation at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (read more about that here and here) brings to the fore is a slipping away from any sort of consensus about what a professor should be and what a student should expect. IU Provost Lauren Robel tried to respond to…