BY LISA MINNICK Lisa Minnick, president of the Western Michigan University AAUP chapter and a member of the executive committee of the AAUP’s national Council, posted this letter to WMU faculty about national student walkouts planned for March 14 and April 20 on the WMU-AAUP blog website yesterday. Dear colleagues, As you are probably aware,…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The new November–December issue of Academe examines political and other divisions within higher education. Contributions from faculty members, AAUP chapter leaders, and an undergraduate activist consider how to advance learning and social justice in tense campus climates. Follow the links in the table of contents below or access the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/november-december-2017. FEATURES The…
BY JOHANN NEEM Johann N. Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General issued the findings of a long-awaited audit in which it concluded that Western Governors University (WGU) had defrauded the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Opponent Testimony for H.B. 66 Submitted By Dr. Amy Thompson, Professor of Public Health Chairman Duffy, Vice Chairman Antani, Ranking Member Sweeney, Members of the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee, my name is Dr. Amy Thompson. For identification purposes, I am a tenured Professor of Public Health and the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Testimony of Stephen Mockabee, Ph.D. Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors House Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee Representative Mike Duffey, Chair October 11, 2017 Chairman Duffey, Ranking Member Sweeney, and members of the Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee: My name is Steve Mockabee, and I am…
BY AARON BARLOW The act of teaching is political. Yet Americans like to pretend that its schools are removed from the public sphere, that they focus on knowledge and skills, nothing more. Rightwing firebrand (though his spark has dimmed against the bright flames of newer agitators like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos) David Horowitz has…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ This blog post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on September 27 and appears here with the author’s permission. Lara Schwartz teaches law and government at American University School of Public Affairs On the night of Sept. 26, shortly after historian Ibram Kendi introduced American University’s new Antiracist Research and Policy Center, an as-yet unidentified man hung posters of…
BY LUIS I. PRÁDANOS Every time I mention the obvious in a classroom—that most industrial economic activities deplete energy and materials and, therefore, constant economic growth in the context of a limited biosphere is a biophysical impossibility—I am moved by some students’ honest reactions. Their response will be some variation of “That makes sense. Why did nobody tell us before that as the global economy grows, the living systems of…
BY PAT BOWNE David Brooks apparently hit a nerve with his sandwich column. My friends’ reactions on social media ranged from stories about their own discomfort in fancy restaurants to comments about food snobbery to accusing me of wanting the right-wing PC police to stop us all from eating kale. Perhaps the commonest remark I…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN It was a tale of two speeches. Yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the right-wing American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) meeting in Denver, where she accused teacher unions of being “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. Just hours earlier Randi…