BY JAY M. SMITH Last summer UNC–Chapel Hill became ground zero for COVID-19, setting off a prolonged exercise in blame-shifting. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences recently convened an emergency meeting of department chairs at which she announced the provost’s “disappointment” in the faculty. Specifically, university administrators are disappointed that so many…
BY A SAINT LEO UNIVERSITY FACULTY MEMBER In the face of challenging and even perilous working conditions, teachers at all levels need unions to help protect them during the pandemic. However, one university in Florida used the pandemic as an opportunity for union busting. The story of the unilateral disenfranchisement of faculty members at Saint…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Monday, Stanford University issued the following statement concerning Trump adviser, “herd immunity” advocate, and Hoover Institution fellow Scott Atlas: The university has been asked to comment on recent statements made by Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is on leave of absence from that position. Stanford’s…
BY JEFFREY SOMMERS A half century back, as noted in the fall 2020 Academe article I coauthored, “A Marshall Plan for Rebuilding Higher Education,” the United States began its retreat from public investments that had originally made it the world’s premier power. No longer wishing, or even thinking it possible, to retain its position of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) was published on September 27. We all recognize that this is an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone in higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased costs, yet state support is being cut back and enrollments…
BY JACK C. LANE Rollins College’s embrace of AAUP principles and subsequent removal from the AAUP’s list of censured institutions in 1939 brought an end to a crisis at the college that had begun in 1933 with the dismissal of Professor John Rice and eleven other faculty members, an episode discussed in my article for…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic this past spring prompted the rapid turn to remote teaching and learning; caused uncertainty about whether teaching and learning would continue in the remote mode this fall; resulted in dire enrollment forecasts for domestic and international students; and raised questions about what plans should be made…
BY WAVY THE BEAR Hi! I’m Wavy the Bear, senior stuffed brand ambassador at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn! The nice folks at the AAUP liked the story about “managerial techniques” and “academic freedom” that I sent them for their journal, so now I’m “blogging”! Can I get a “wow”?!? I wrote that story back…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 11 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year’s volume considers the opposing visions of the governed campus and the “managed campus.” As the…