The Ohio Conference of AAUP Unanimously Endorses a Resolution Expressing Support for Wisconsin Faculty

This resolution is the second of four presented and unanimously endorsed at The Ohio Conference annual meeting on November 7. Whereas members of the Ohio Conference AAUP harbor a grave concern that our colleagues in Wisconsin have lost tenure protections and collective bargaining rights; Whereas the members of the Ohio Conference AAUP believe that for…

What’s So Radical about Defending Public Education?

Being antagonistic to corporatization should not necessarily be conflated with being broadly antagonistic to corporations. Universities and corporations have long had mutually beneficial relationships that have caused relatively infrequent controversies. And, just to be clear, although some faculty with more progressive political values have been very skeptical of those relationships between their universities and corporate…

Experts and Adjuncts: The New Model for Higher Education

The American professoriate once ranged from professionals who taught a course as an adjunct—a contribution to their professions, the compensation being almost nothing—to the regular (but generally poorly paid, often relying on family fortune to sustain them) faculty who generally assumed lifetime security at institutions whose operation their colleagues dominated. That changed over the decades starting…

LSU Senate Replies to Administration

Late yesterday I posted news that the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge Faculty Senate had voted by an overwhelming 39-5 margin to censure LSU Chancellor-President F. King Alexander and two other top administrators for their roles in the dismissal of tenured professor Teresa Buchanan.  The LSU administration responded with the following press release, issued…

A History and Defense of Tenure

Sol Gittleman, the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor at Tufts University, has been a professor of German, Judaic studies and biblical literature and is a former provost of Tufts.  In an article that first appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Tufts Magazine, and is now available on the web under the title “Tenure:…

Among School Children: A Review of Steven Salaita’s "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom"

This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…

AAUP Joins Amicus Brief in Vergara Case

A bit more than a year ago a California Superior Court, ruling in Vergara v. California, overturned California statutes guaranteeing due process protections for K-12 teachers with more than two years experience (so-called “teacher tenure”) and layoff by seniority.  At the time I posted several items on the case, first here, then here, here, and…