BY JONATHAN REES “To believe in ‘the greater good’ is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.” – Joan…
BY KELLY HAND This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on the Government of Colleges and Universities. In its introduction, the Statement gives as one reason for promoting a common understanding of principles of shared governance that “a college or university in which all the components are aware of their interdependence,…
BY LOREN GLASS Loren Glass is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa. This op-ed appeared last week in the Quad City Times. Based on recent statements by University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld as well as various members and representatives of the Iowa Board of Regents it would seem that there is…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the lead paragraphs from an article written by Susan Snyder for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Tweets by the chairman of Ursinus College’s board of trustees have drawn ire from some students and at least one fellow board member, who called them ‘elitist, racist, sexist, body-shaming,’ and ‘generally intolerant,’ and resigned…
BY DEBORAH MUTNICK Day 3 of the LIU lockout. Labor Day. I have been locked out of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus by an administration that makes my colleagues and me feel like poster children for the neoliberal corporatization of higher education. We have lost our health care and other benefits, our pay, and our…
BY AARON BARLOW There’s a short piece on Inside Higher Ed today that says the Long Island University at Brooklyn administration will lock out faculty members starting at midnight “unless the faculty union immediately ratifies a contract and that it has lined up new faculty members to teach.” This is all sorts of crazy. One…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN “We need a chancellor who will not be engaged in the doublespeak of proclaiming UC Berkeley’s preeminence as a public university while simultaneously insisting on marketizing every aspect of its existence. We need a chancellor who does not believe that the negative impact on educational access and the quality of our…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This post is an edited synthesis of two communications sent to the bargaining unit faculty members (BUFMs) at Wright State University about what we know about the reductions to the budgets of the administrative and the academic units at the university. The details will probably be of little interest to faculty…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In September 2012, I began contributing to the national conversation about higher education by tackling the concept of leadership in one of my first blogs for the Huffington Post. In that first article, I suggested, “the job has evolved, but the national imperative for presidents to lead as well as govern remains…
BY HANK REICHMAN Just one week after University of California at Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi resigned following an investigation commissioned by UC President Janet Napolitano, which found she had violated “multiple policies,” “exercised poor judgment” and had “not been candid with university leadership,” a second UC chancellor has announced his resignation, pending selection of a…