This week the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-leaning group founded by Lynne Cheney (aka Darth Vader’s wife) released a report endorsed by a group of twenty-three trustees, administrators, and a handful of largely conservative faculty from elite institutions, headed by Benno Schmidt, former President of Yale University and Chair of the…
The following letter by Michael Rothberg originally appeared on his website. Rothberg is the Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) and Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in…
By Nicholas Burbules, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I want to thank Mr. Wilson for sending us his posting on “Shared Governance and the Salaita Case” and inviting us to respond. Joyce Tolliver and I do call for an honest debate in our editorial. We fully accept that there are serious, principled positions on different…
I spoke on a podcast, This Week at InsideHigherEd, about the Salaita case, along with former Barnard president Judith Shapiro, who argued that the Salaita case indicated the need for more shared governance. I would argue that the Salaita case is a good reason to understand what shared governance really means. Shared governance doesn’t mean that…
The New York Post recently ran a story by Carl Campanile under this headline: “College Liberals Spurn $10M Gift from the Koch Brothers.” Mitchell Langbert, a faculty member in the Business School at Brooklyn College, had been in extended discussions with the Koch Brothers Foundation about establishing a “financial center” within the Business School. When…
Today’s Inside Higher Ed features an article about shared governance that focuses on a new book by Larry G. Gerber, Professor Emeritus of History at Auburn University, entitled The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University. Gerber is a talented and distinguished historian and a longtime AAUP activist and leader,…
In an article titled “Outsourced in Michigan” written for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty chronicles the movement among Michigan’s community colleges to outsource the hiring of adjunct faculty and the management of related “payroll duties” to a corporation called EDUStaff. EDUStaff had previously specialized in providing substitute teachers for K-12 systems. So, if you have…
Bonuses, both for performance and longevity, have become commonplace for higher-ed administrators at both public and private institutions. Indeed, these bonuses have become so commonplace that they now generally go unnoticed and unquestioned. But when such bonuses continue to be given during periods of great budget constraints, while faculty and staff compensation and/or positions are…
It is almost impossible for those who live outside the academy to understand and appreciate how American colleges and universities govern themselves. Basically, college governance has three partners – the faculty, the administration, and the trustees. It’s commonly thought to be a kind of “three-leg” stool with each leg required to be strong enough to…
Guest Blogger Seth Kahn is a faculty member (composition and rhetoric; critical pedagogy; qualitative research methods) at West Chester University of PA. He’s a peace activist and serves in several positions for the PASSHE schools’ faculty union (APSCUF). If you’re a Facebook friend or in my G+ network, you’ve seen me post a link to this petition calling for…