BY MYIA CLARISSE WILLIAMS AND VERNON C. LINDSAY One “big beautiful bill” has introduced ugly stress responses and expanded job duties among diverse higher education practitioners. Current provisions impose additional limits on Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS loans. Federal loan restrictions, the loss of DEI initiatives, and other meaningful programs that impact student retention also…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today I attended one of the over 275 “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations outside of DOGE Dictator Elon Musk’s dealerships nationwide. This one was on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California, where at its height I would estimate some 800-1000 people gathered to voice our outrage at the ongoing Republican coup. It was a spirited…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Amid our new national situation that officially began this week I hope readers of this blog find useful two books published this month.Asking you to forgive the self-promotion, I note from the start that I have chapters in both. The first book is about exile, specifically in higher education. The collection of…
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 RUDY FICHTENBAUM Melvyn Goldfinger, who was associate professor of neuroscience, cell biology, and physiology at Wright State University, died on September 17 at the age of seventy-four. Mel Goldfinger was a champion for academic freedom, shared governance, and the economic security of the faculty–the three bedrock principles of the AAUP. It was Mel, along…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY In the middle of a pandemic, faculty activists have accomplished something of real significance. Working with their provost, the town-hall style faculty governance group at Worcester Polytechnic Institute has managed to secure forty-five tenure lines for existing “teaching” faculty. While the idea of expanding tenure to include teaching faculty has been promoted…
BY MARTIN KICH I initially became involved in AAUP because I was very impressed by Rudy Fichtenbaum’s and Jim Vance’s commitment to defending our colleagues’ right to fair treatment—by their commitment to the principles that I would come to recognize as the core principles of AAUP: academic freedom, shared governance, and economic security. I recall…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is an extraordinary performance of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by the brave men and women from NHS in honor of the Llandudno’s Venu Cymru, which has been turned into a temporary coronavirus hospital. During this process, the facility has been renamed to Ysbyty Enfys, which is Welsh for Rainbow Hospital,…