BY LOUIS EPSTEIN Faculty have plenty of reasons to feel anxious, among them the widely publicized threats to our unique, enviable forms of shared governance. I won’t rehearse those threats here. If we spend more time bemoaning our present state than articulating our strengths, we’ll slip into a malaise from which recovery is unlikely. Instead,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the AAUP released a special investigative report, “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” In interview after interview with faculty members in Florida, the investigating committee, which I co-chaired, “heard repeated complaints not only about the silence of their campus and system administrators but also about…
BY THE AAUP-PENN EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE This morning, Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management in New York, who initiated the successful effort to remove University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, distributed an email to the university’s trustees posing a series of eighteen questions, several of which raise serious concerns about the fate…
BY HANK REICHMAN On Thursday, the Board of Trustees of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., voted to close the school at the end of the current academic year. Saint Rose President Marcia White confirmed the decision in a letter to the campus community. Between 500 and 600 college employees will lose their…
BY HANK REICHMAN As higher education reels from continuing assaults on academic freedom, tenure, shared governance and education itself in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, we now face the possibility that another state’s major flagship institution may soon exist only as a shadow of its former self, the victim of a…
BY JOHN A. ETERNO Faculty at many universities are experiencing frustration. Universities should be bastions of creativity, scholarship, and democracy, but administrators have been using a corporate management style which invariably leaves the faculty behind. Most importantly, shared governance, once a staple of higher learning, is becoming a relic of the past. Faculty, to the…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 15, Medaille University in Buffalo, New York (until last summer, Medaille College) announced that it will cease operations and close after 148 years on August 31. The announcement came less than a week after neighboring Trocaire College informed Medaille it would pull out of an agreement to purchase the school,…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees chair David Boliek explained the trustees’ rationale for seeking to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership, he cited an imaginary problem in search of a blatantly political solution. On January 28, on the Fox and Friends news…
BY THE NORTH DAKOTA UNIVERSITY SYSTEM COUNCIL OF COLLEGE FACULTIES Below is a letter from the Council of College Faculties Executive Committee to the chair, Austen Schauer, and members of the Government and Veterans Affairs Committee of the North Dakota state legislature regarding House Bill 1446, followed by the text of a resolution the council…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Years ago, I was speaking with a colleague about one of the paradoxes of university life: tenured faculty enjoy more job security than almost any other occupational group in US society, yet they are often afraid to fight for their interests as a group. My colleague accounted for this lack of collective…