POSTED BY STEVE MUMME AND MARGARET LECOMPTE Steve Mumme is a Professor at Colorado State University and the AAUP-Colorado Conference Co-President, and Margaret LeCompte is a Professor Emerita and President of the AAUP Chapter, University of Colorado at Boulder. Colorado’s college students are deemed by some to be civics deficient and University of Colorado Board of Regents…
BY HANK REICHMAN University of California President and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been a leader among university administrators in opposing the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, most recently speaking forcefully to denounce the administration’s hideous policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Now UC faculty are calling on Napolitano…
BY JOERG TIEDE Delegates to the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors voted today to remove the University of Iowa from the list of sanctioned institutions as well as to remove Stillman College from the list of censured administrations. The AAUP places academic institutions on the sanction list for serious departures…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN Joe Knott, a member of the Board of Governors of the UNC system, wrote in a News & Observer op-ed on May 25th that UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty suffers from lack of “viewpoint diversity,” by which he means too few conservative professors for his liking. How does he propose to fix this alleged…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT Guest blogger Robert A. Scott is President Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus, Adelphi University, and Author, How University Boards Work, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. I was recently part of a team engaged to review a regional teaching university with a new president who wants his institution to become a research university…
BY BEN TRACHTENBERG The Godfather famously advised, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Regardless of whether university trustees view faculty as friends, enemies, or something else altogether, they would be wise to pursue greater closeness with the people doing the teaching and research at their favorite campus. In particular, more universities should include…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, May 22, two hundred tenured faculty members at the University of Southern California (USC) released an open letter to the school’s board of trustees calling for the resignation of university President C. L. Max Nikias, saying he had “lost the moral authority to lead” in the wake of revelations that a…
BY SANDIE GRAVETT AND STELLA ANDERSON Last week, we formally launched our study Faculty Employment Rights and Hearing Procedures in Public Non-Union Universities by emailing a survey link to faculty members on the higher education campuses in the constituent institutions of the University of North Carolina. These 16 higher education campuses provide an excellent test…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The case of Jay Smith, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill history professor whose course on college athletics was quashed by university administrators, has received considerable attention because it raises serious questions about academic freedom. Yet, as recent events attest, the case is also important on shared governance grounds. Specifically, it…
BY BETHANY LETIECQ When I joined the George Mason University faculty in 2013, I had already had a taste of what could be achieved when faculty, students, community members, and organizations work together in common cause. Earlier in my career, I helped organize a faculty union at Montana State University and, in my community-based work…