BY JONATHAN REES I spent much of last weekend with two of my colleagues from the Colorado Conference of the AAUP at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO, helping to form a brand spanking new AAUP chapter. Hello everybody in the Paris of the Valley! [JR waves enthusiastically.] Turns out their chapter will be helpful…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past several months this blog has posted a number of items about the growing and dangerous trend of conducting searches for top administrators in secret, with no public disclosure of candidates. The disastrous consequences of such searches have already been witnessed at the Universities of Missouri and Iowa and have…
BY HANK REICHMAN This morning University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent an email to the entire university community announcing a new strategic planning initiative. The entire lengthy but frustratingly vague message has been reproduced on the Remaking the University blog. Summaries were also quickly released by Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle…
BY MARTIN KICH On Thursday, February 4, the Faculty Senate at the University of Akron voted no confidence in President Scott Scarborough’s administration—by a vote of 50-2. Before the vote was taken, Scarborough had spoken at some length about his plans for the coming year and had answered several questions. He was not, however, present for…
BY MARTIN KICH In a post to this blog in December, I reported on the decision by the Board of Trustees of Eastern Michigan University (EMU) to continue the university’s involvement in the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) that Governor Snyder’s administration created ostensibly to “save” Detroit’s “failing” public school system. That decision was made in…
BY HENRY REICHMAN Over the weekend Phil Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle broke a story [behind a paywall] that revealed growing concerns among UC Berkeley faculty about a previously secret decision by University of California President Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security, to install new computer hardware capable of monitoring computer…
BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
Years ago, before I even thought about teaching as a full-time and permanent career, I spent a few semesters working for an online “university.” I won’t call what I did “teaching.” After all, the institution didn’t. I was a “facilitator” responsible for a section or two of the required Composition course. It had been designed…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative group that has advocated increased activism by college and university trustees and a “return” to “traditional” curricula in Western Civilization and American military, constitutional, and diplomatic history (let’s put aside for now that, given the recent behavior of most trustee boards, these two goals may…
Among the most controversial and widely publicized controversies during the recent autumn of student unrest was that surrounding the incident at Yale University, where a residence hall adviser’s email about Halloween costumes prompted a national debate over the allegedly competing values of free speech and racial justice. I previously commented at some length on the…