BY AN ANONYMOUS SAINT CATHERINE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR Saint Catherine University sits on an idyllic green bluff in a serene part of Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s not too far from the Mississippi River. When it’s hushed, you can hear the faint sounds of a barge horn as it slowly heads down to New Orleans. It’s the…
BY WISCONSIN CONFERENCE OF THE AAUP On Monday, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted unanimously to appoint Jennifer Mnookin as the next chancellor of UW–Madison. Within hours, many leading Wisconsin Republicans—both elected officials and candidates for statewide office—issued nearly identical statements of opposition to her appointment. We write to condemn these statements…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT Since the release last week of the report by the AAUP’s Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina system, UNC administrators have responded to the charge that, as the report puts it, the UNC system is “in trouble.” Unsurprisingly, responses from university officials…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT On Thursday, April 28, members of local AAUP chapters held a press conference at which they presented the report by the AAUP’s Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina system, which was released that morning. The report shows how in the seventeen-campus University…
BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU In the past several years, Linfield University in Oregon has gained a reputation for creating a hostile work environment. One reason is that it has displayed a willingness to harass and even fire tenured faculty who are willing to point out its failures in key areas like sexual harassment, faculty governance, and…
BY DEBORAH BELL, SUSAN DENNISON, SPOMA JOVANOVIC, JESSICA NAVARRO, AND JONATHAN TUDGE As colleges and universities address myriad crises—including enrollment declines, operating changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, questions about the value of a college degree, and the need to mitigate racial tensions on campus—higher education budgets have come under increasing scrutiny, and talk…
BY MARK JAMES A year ago, I was called in to meet with my dean after a parent complained to the president’s office that I had been discussing white supremacy in my American and African American literature classes. I wrote about that experience last summer in Inside Higher Ed, and I hoped that would be…
BY MARTHA MCCAUGHEY AND SCOTT WELSH In the fall 2021 issue of Academe we describe the problem of a “shadow curriculum” in the form of student-affairs programming that (re)shapes students’ education on campus, encroaching on the faculty’s role in governance of courses and curriculum. From our perspective as faculty members guided by AAUP principles, such…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE On October 14, the AAUP released its third report on data collected from this year’s Shared Governance Survey as part of a special issue of Academe dedicated to governance. This report focuses on responses to questions about the composition of senates and similar faculty governance bodies and the conduct of presidential searches, as well as findings…
BY THE AAUP Fall 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 4 The fall 2021 issue of Academe surveys the present state of academic governance. It includes a new report on findings of the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, firsthand accounts of governance struggles on campuses around the country, and a pair of articles that confront the threat posed…