image of N95 surgical mask lying on a table next to another mask

The University in a Moment of Intersecting Crises

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.…

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crowd rallying with Palestinian flags

Why Academics Should Care about the Oppression of Palestinians

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…

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Hallin's Spheres

Getting Back to Consensus

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…

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“Viewpoint Diversity” and UNC-Chapel Hill

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…

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School teacher punished by order of Camillus.

A “Voluntary Mandatory” Retirement?

BY AARON BARLOW What’s with our disdain for age? I felt it myself for a bit in the sixties, that “don’t trust anyone over thirty” nonsense. But I got over it—even before I got old myself. The people who were influencing me most back then, I realized, were even older than my ancient parents who,…

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The Regent Who Wouldn’t Leave

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…

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view of Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn on a cloudy winter day

A Letter to the CUNY Chancellor

POSTED BY JOAN W. SCOTT In March, Rachel Ida Buff published an Academe Blog post recounting the attacks by the Canary Mission and others on faculty at Kingsborough Community College. In response to the attack, a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students decided to greet the incoming chancellor, Felix Matos (a “veteran” administrator in…

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Close-up of poster showing people holding signs related to higher education issues and spelling out A-A-U-P.

Spring 2019 Academe Highlights AAUP Chapter Power

POSTED BY KELLY HAND The new issue of Academe highlights the power of faculty to build strength on their campuses by organizing through AAUP advocacy and collective bargaining chapters. Articles focus on presidential searches, private donor influence, adjunct faculty activism, risks of gun violence, retirement, and other topics. Follow the links in the table of contents…

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