On “Academic Analytics”

Statement on “Academic Analytics” and Research Metrics The following statement was approved by the Executive Committee of the AAUP Council at its March meeting: Recently a number of colleges and universities have contracted with independent private companies to provide allegedly “objective” quantitative information about faculty scholarly “productivity.” Among the most prominent of these “metrics providers”…

Against Grants

BY AARON BARLOW A decade or so ago, I applied for a travel grant to examine papers of Carlos Salzedo, a twentieth-century French/American harpist. The request was turned down, the result of a scathing evaluation by someone who was incensed that I had not mentioned the other important French/American harpist of the time, Marcel Grandjany.…

Academic Productivity

BY AARON BARLOW In a column for Inside Higher Ed this week, Philip Nel of Kansas State University creates a list of the reasons so many academics work so much. It’s an essay worth reading, not only because it flies in the face of the myth that professors lead lives of ease but because of…

UWM AAUP Calls on Regents to Support Research and Access

The following statement was released today by the AAUP’s University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee chapter. UWM AAUP Calls on the Board of Regents to Support and Sustain UWM’s Research and Access Missions The eyes of the country are on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) this week as the campus hosts a Democratic presidential debate. What will UWM…

Rutgers Faculty Opposes Use of “Big Data” in Academic and Employment Decisions: Resolution Raises Concerns over Mistakes and Narrowing Scholarship

Use of a proprietary database that purports to show the publications, citations, books and grants awarded to a professor provides far too limited a perspective on faculty achievement and creates the potential for career-ending errors, according to David M. Hughes, professor of anthropology and president of the faculty union AAUP-AFT at Rutgers. The same data…

Open Access and Academic Freedom

The open access movement in scholarly publishing has been widely and rightly praised, but its potentially negative implications for academic freedom are too often ignored.  Today an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed by Rick Anderson, associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, makes an important…

The Assault on Climate Science

Today’s New York Times has a terrific op-ed piece by Michael Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and is a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.  Mann writes about the efforts of Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space…