BY ERIC SANDGREN The following was published as an op-ed column on December 27 in the Wisconsin State Journal and is reposted with permission. The original column may be found here. Eric Sandgren is Professor of Experimental Pathology at UW Madison and vice-president of the Wisconsin state conference of the AAUP. The next University of…
BY THE COMMITTEE ON COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE On November 1, following the announcement of current University of Wisconsin system president Ray Cross’s retirement, the president of the Board of Regents of the UW system appointed a nine-member presidential search committee. Breaking decades of institutional precedent, he did not include any faculty members on the…
For its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2020, the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom seeks original, scholarly articles exploring the ways the myriad managerial techniques in use on campuses today affect academic freedom and democratic faculty governance. Actuarial concerns about liability result in decisions made beyond the purview of governance bodies and even campus administration. We seek submissions that contemplate professional life and practices of academic freedom in this context, as well as those engaged with the possibility of resistance to these new regimes.
BY HANK REICHMAN When early last month the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees (IHL) appointed Glenn Boyce as the new Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, faculty and students were outraged. Boyce had been hired as a consultant to the search committee for the new chancellor and was never formally submitted as a…
BY EMILY K HOBSON AND JENNA N. HANCHEY Since August 2017, when one of our students became a symbol of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) has seen a rise in white nationalist activity and hate speech on our campus. Yet, UNR is just one target in…
BY AARON BARLOW In response to a recent post of mine, a professor wrote, “We are in a highly competitive and insecure field. How the heck do we rise together?” The competitive nature and insecurity of academia certainly have been exacerbated of the past decades (they were always with us); the only way that is…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT The length of service for college and university presidents seems to be getting shorter and shorter. Almost weekly, and in some weeks more often, we read about a campus president being fired or put on leave. There are books on failed presidencies and books on leadership. Why are there failures? What…
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…
