POSTED ON BEHALF OF THE COALITION FOR ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION On behalf of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE), we share with you a template titled Know Your Governing Board. This document’s purpose is to encourage and enable us as faculty members to learn more about bodies that too often do not…
BY HANK REICHMAN The appointment of Scott C. Beardsley, an inside candidate, as president of the University of Virginia has garnered more than its share of controversy, as Inside Higher Ed has reported here and here. The vacancy resulted from the departure of President James Ryan, who resigned under pressure as Virginia Board of Visitors…
BY HANK REICHMAN This week the AAUP released a report, In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates, prepared by a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance. I am a member of this committee and helped write the report, which demonstrates how recent state legislative actions…
BY AFSHAN JAFAR We have recently seen accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and especially Texas. In a recently published report titled In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates, the AAUP’s Committee on College…
BY ADAM RZEPKA A large public university is wiping out all of its humanities departments. It isn’t sure why. As I write this, our Interim Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS)—a newly hired computer scientist who will soon be both Interim Dean and Interim Provost—is telling faculty and staff at the…
BY LAURIE ESSIG On Wednesday, October 1, the Department of Education sent nine universities a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The document asks universities to comply with a variety of restrictions like capping the number of international students and not considering factors like race or gender in hiring and admissions. More ominously, the…
BY HANK REICHMAN If there’s a better examplar of the higher education administrative establishment’s failures than E. Gordon Gee, I can’t think of one. Gee, who has held more university presidencies than any other American, has cut an extraordinary path of scandal and negligence pretty much everywhere he’s been. Yet he continues not only to…
BY MICHAEL BANERJEE A July 26, 2025 New York Times article brought to light the federal government’s desire to have Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard University’s governing board, step down as part of Harvard’s negotiations with the federal government, which the university sued in April after the government demanded that…
BY AARON NISENSON The Trump administration has successfully buried a key component of the Columbia settlement agreement. The focus on monetary damages paid by the university and restrictions on campus protests and diversity policies obscures the Trump administration’s imposition of the right to interfere directly in university admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. The Trump administration…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Every AAUP member should be concerned about the new accreditation group recently birthed in Florida. This week Louisiana became the seventh state to say it was joining. While only for now targeting states in the South the group’s business plan shows its strategy is to take on as clients public schools in…