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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows are the opening paragraphs of a news report for the Associated Press written by Matthew Barakat: Virginia’s largest public university granted the conservative Charles Koch Foundation a say in the hiring and firing of professors in exchange for millions of dollars in donations, according to newly released documents. The…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE The AAUP today wrote to the governing board of the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona to convey our concern over apparent departures from generally accepted principles of academic governance. The matter stems from a February resolution of the governing board that terminated a “meet-and-confer” provision of the faculty policy manual and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik has reported on how an “Unusual Donor Agreement at UNLV Raises Questions about Fund-Raising and Governance”: Len Jessup is on his way out as president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, after receiving unfavorable reviews from the system chancellor and clashing with…