Hank Reichman, the First Vice-President of AAUP and a frequent contributor to this blog, is marking his retirement by teaching a seminar on the history of academic freedom in the American university. Unprompted, his provost handed him a sizable check and invited him to organize a broader symposium, a speakers series, on the history of…
I was initially going to add this brief post as a comment on Ulf Kirchdorfer’s new post “Papa John’s Pizza Plot: Heimlich Maneuver Needed for Schools, Parents, and Students,” but then I realized that I had more to say than would be appropriate for a “comment.” Ulf’s post is insightful and wryly humorous, and you…
After a very contentious search, the Board of Trustees of Florida State University have announced that John Thrasher will be the institution’s new president. The firm originally hired to facilitate the search was fired after faculty and students organized protests against the firm’s very obvious interest in promoting Thrasher’s candidacy and very superficial interest in…
This is a guest post by Miranda Merklein, a contributor to the recent September-October issue of Academe. Merklein is the acting president of the Santa Fe Community College-AAUP chapter, where she works as an adjunct professor. She also teaches at Northern New Mexico College. Follow her on Twitter @MirandaMerklein. The organizing drive really picked up over the…
The following is the text of a statement issued on September 11 by the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA): On Friday Sept. 5, Chancellor Dirks of UC Berkeley circulated an open statement to his campus community that sought to define the limits of appropriate debate at Berkeley. Issued as the campus approaches…
Last Friday, the Colorado Conference of the AAUP (for which I serve as co-President) held a one-day meeting at Fort Lewis College in Durango devoted to the topic of shared governance. Our thinking behind planning this gathering was that Colorado higher education seemed to be going crazy. So many weird things had been happening at…
If you want to engage your students in a thoughtful debate about public discourse in the age of Facebook and Twitter, you can of course use the ten or twelve excellent posts that John K. Wilson, Hank Reichman, Michael Berube, and others have made to this blog on the Steven Salaita case. If you would like…
On August 16, the Lafayette Journal-Gazette ran this small item [http://www.jconline.com/story/news/college/2014/08/16/ipfw-faculty-unhappy-daniels-comments/14181695/]: “Some Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne faculty members are unhappy with comments Purdue University President Mitch Daniels made about the role of regional colleges. “The Journal Gazette reports the former governor told a public radio host that higher-education advocates in Fort Wayne are mistaken…
Dear Chairman Bense and Governor Scott: The battle over FSU’s next President seems to have slowed, except that the FSU Board of Trustees (BOT) has silently “postponed” its Aug. 26th meeting. This meeting was the last chance for Chair Allan Bense to answer the overwhelming call to restructure the Presidential Search Advisory Committee (PSAC) before…
In a major victory for faculty and staff and for reproductive rights more generally, the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) has reversed a previous decision to allow two Catholic universities to eliminate coverage of most abortions for employees, declaring that state law requires health insurance plans to cover all abortions. The state had previously…