BY MARIAH QUINN The AAUP and eleven other groups issued a statement after President Trump announced in a March 2 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he would soon issue an executive order denying federal research funds to colleges and universities that do not “support free speech.” Read the full statement. President Trump’s…
BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that during…
BY JEFFREY SOMMERS The following open letter to the chancellor, provost, and faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) is reposted by permission from the blog of the UWM AAUP chapter. Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Global Studies at UWM. Dear Chancellor Mone, Provost Britz, and Colleagues, I could…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the welcome news arrived that scandal-ridden Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would, as previously hinted, be departing his post by year’s end. The announcement came just days after release of a scathing 38-page report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Science under Siege at the Department of the Interior (DOI), which…
BY MARTIN KICH As Big Data begins to define our obsessive discussion of politics and our universities respond to the demand for specialists by developing graduate programs in the discipline, it is easy to feel as if we are swimming or, rather, drowning in data—that there is so much data that instead of providing clarity,…
BY KAILEY ADKINS Students and faculty have been clear: George Mason University must begin reviewing all of their future donor agreements for conflicts of interest and make them more transparent to the public. The Provost at George Mason University will be presenting his recommendations to the university’s board to improve gift acceptance policies next Wednesday.…
BY MARTIN KICH The Atlantic has released its annual compilation of the top 25 news photos. (Over three days, they are following up with three sets of 25 other photos highlighting news stories from throughout the year.) Five of the 25 photos have a connection to education-related stories. They include a photo of Christine Blasey-Ford being…
BY MARTIN KICH When I first drafted this post about a week ago, I did not realize that the Trump administration’s talking points on the Mueller investigation would so quickly boil down to the following: (1) if the president is now openly admitting what he previously lied about, then there is no subterfuge and therefore…
BY MARTIN KICH Early last summer, Sherrod Brown’s senatorial campaign contacted the leadership of the Ohio Conference about what he could provide to us on his positions. The OCAAUP tries to limit its focus to issues related to higher-education and collective-bargaining rights. Senator Brown’s positions on labor issues are very well known, and after some…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH State support for public higher education—or, more precisely, the decline in such support—remains a persistent and significant issue. It continues to exacerbate the level of debt that students are assuming to get degrees (or often to pursue degrees that they do not manage to complete) and constricting the number of faculty…