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…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Recent years have seen extensive cuts in foreign language education at US colleges and universities. Between 2013 and 2016 alone some 651 foreign language programs were eliminated. Often these cuts are part of broader assaults on the humanities and liberal education more generally. In 2018 the AAUP and the Association of…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN The right has recently adopted the language of “viewpoint diversity” in their critique of allegedly liberal professors. “Diversity” sounds nice (how could one be against it?) and, coupled with “viewpoint,” has a ring of freedom about it. But this rhetoric barely masks the intent: to justify hiring conservative faculty and creating conservative…
BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER (Cross-posted from Language Politics) “[F]ixed terms of members of boards shall expire on May 1.” So says Wis. stat. 15.07(1)(c), the portion of state law that governs when the terms of state board members—including members of the UW System Board of Regents—come to an end. So it was curious to see that…