BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL America’s colleges and universities are in the early stages of dramatic change. For many, the concentration has been on the development of new academic programs, designed to differentiate academic offerings among institutions and create new revenue streams. For others, efforts to find efficiencies internally or through participation in consortia have improved…
BY ALTHA CRAVEY I’ve been attending UNC Board of Governors’ meetings for about three years. I knew it was important to understand the Board’s increasing willingness to interfere in campus affairs across the state. The Board had already ceased being a bi-partisan Board with equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, a “gentleman’s agreement” that…
BY HANK REICHMAN The University of Wisconsin-Superior announced this week that it will suspend 25 programs, including 9 majors, 15 minors and one graduate program, according to reports by the Duluth News-Tribune and Wisconsin Public Radio. Among the majors affected are sociology, theater, journalism and political science. The university has now suspended 40 programs since…
BY RACHEL BUFF The following is reposted with permission from the atlasofadifficult blog. Rachel Buff is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She recently assumed editorship of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Here are the new policies that were adopted this month, or will be adopted next month by the Wisconsin…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is the sixth section of the most recent higher education report produced by the Ohio Conference of AAUP. John McNay, the President of the Conference, and Sara Kilpatrick, the Executive Director of the Conference, deserve kudos for doing the bulk of the work on this report. The report has…
BY HARRY HELLENBRAND Harry Hellenbrand served for many years as provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) following a distinguished career as a faculty member, academic senator, department chair and dean at CSU campuses. The essay below addresses changes in curriculum imposed on the CSU’s 23 campuses and their faculty by the…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE One of the primary findings of the AAUP’s investigative report regarding the University of Iowa’s 2015 presidential search was that “the search was structured and engineered by the regents’ leadership from the outset to identify a figure from the business world congenial to its image of ‘transformative leadership.’” An AP story out yesterday confirms this conclusion.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for IndyWeek, which serves the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, Erica Hellerstein reports: After months of contentious back-and-forth, the UNC Board of Governors voted this morning [Friday, September 8] to ban the UNC Center for Civil Rights from doing legal work on behalf of the state’s poor and minority…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I had occasion to look a bit into the history of the University of California at Berkeley, where I earned my doctorate and in whose shadow I have lived most of my adult life. In doing so, I encountered an interesting document, “Shared Governance at the University of California: An Historical…
BY AARON BARLOW Christine Emba, editor of In Theory, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post on July 28, 2017 calling the current mania for ‘outcomes’ a “familiar trap.” She was focusing on politics, particularly on the failure of health care ‘repeal and replace’ but her thoughts apply to education as well. They apply,…