On April 17, higher ed unions, AAUP chapters, and student organizations across the U.S. are coming together for a national day of action to fight back against the coordinated assault on teaching and learning, and to mobilize for a system of higher education that serves the public good. Our aim is not just to beat…
BY BILL V. MULLEN A dangerous and broadly worded bill making faculty vulnerable to termination for not conforming to a state legislature’s definition of political diversity will likely be voted on by the Indiana state legislature on Tuesday, February 27th. Senate Bill 202 mandates that in order to receive tenure faculty must demonstrate that they…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified on Capitol Hill on December 5, 2023, at a hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” and the bipartisan political backlash with demands for their resignations is unprecedented in the history of higher education, including the forced resignation of Penn president…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY I was asked by our state’s largest newspaper here in Georgia to write a column offering some priorities for higher education as lawmakers return in January for our annual legislative session. You can likely guess my priorities. Bigger budgets, better salary, and stopping culture war attacks on higher education. But those priorities…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last Friday, the administration of Indiana University decided to delay seeking trustee approval of a plan announced just two weeks earlier to move its Kinsey Institute to a separate nonprofit organization. The plan, made in response to legislators requiring a ban on all state funds to the Kinsey Institute because of…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the fall 2023 issue of Academe, out this week. The full table of contents for the issue is available at https://www.aaup.org/issue/fall-2023-confronting-legislative-attacks-higher-education. Students returning to New College of Florida this fall found a campus in the midst of stark transformation. More than a third of the faculty…
BY ELI MEYERHOFF AND ISAAC KAMOLA Learning is under attack. Right-wing politicians, activists, and well-funded political organizations have organized assaults on schools, universities, and libraries with book bans, surveillance and harassment of teachers, canceling classes, and “divisive concepts” bills that limit teachers’ rights to talk about topics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The AAUP…
BY JENNIFER RUTH On the August 3 episode of the Progress Texas podcast, guests discussed the recent incidents of political interference at Texas A&M University. One situation involved trustee interference in the hiring of distinguished professor of journalism Kathleen McElroy and the subsequent resignation of President Katherine Banks and the other involved the suspension and…
BY JENNIFER RUTH Three recent pieces are worth reading for insight into Florida HB 999: “DeSantis Higher Ed Bill Heads for the Legislature” (Inside Higher Ed), “New Bill Latest Assault in Florida’s War on Education” (Forbes), and “Never Seen Anything Like it: New Bill Would Write DeSantis’s Higher Ed Vision into Law” (Chronicle of Higher Education).…
BY LOIS K. COX AND KATHERINE H. TACHAU The actuality of the Iowa legislative session makes the time a few months ago when we wrote “The Erosion of Support for Education and Tenure in Iowa” for the winter 2023 issue of Academe seem halcyon in contrast. Our fears for the future of public education in…