Trying to Reduce Higher-Ed Costs without Addressing Administrative Bloat Is Only Making Things Worse

John T. McNay, a professor of history at UC-Blue Ash, is president of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. The following op-ed appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer on September 28 and is available at: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/09/28/opinion-bloat-driving-uc-miami-costs/16410479/   We appreciate the column by David Hodge, president of Miami University, and Santa Ono, president…

Salaita Case: University of Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure is apparently investigating the Steven Salaita case. What will be achieved is unclear since the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, the highest unit an appointee can appeal a dismissal on campus, has already cast its unseemly vote to dismiss the professor eleven…

Salaita Academic Freedom Speaking Tour Heading To Chicago!

UPDATED ITINERARY SEPTEMBER 24, 2014: Professor Steven Salaita, who had been appointed as an associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is planning a five-day speaking tour in Chicago not only to seek a reversal of the sudden cancellation of his appointment, but also to defend other critical-thinking academicians who dare challenge the ideological preferences of chancellors,…

Returning to the Scene of the "Crime": Northeastern Illinois University

The American Association of University Professors censured Northeastern Illinois University at its annual meeting this past June. The annual meeting launched the centennial celebration of the Association’s founding. The censure was an appropriate sanction for the tenure denial of John Boyle, a linguistics professor at the university, who has since moved on to another institution.…

California Appeals Vergara Anti-Tenure Ruling

California Governor Gerry Brown has appealed a state judge’s horrendous ruling that threw out teacher job protection laws on the ground that they deprived students of their constitutional rights.  In a one-page appeal filed yesterday, Brown and California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris argued that a decision of such breadth should  be made by a…

Doctoring Tenure

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has written a five-page letter to the AAUP (pdf), which is considering an investigation of the institution because it revoked tenure and then dismissed two professors under its new system of re-evaluating faculty every seven years. The letter asks over 30 questions to the AAUP about its procedures…

Doubling Down on the Exploitation of Adjunct Faculty

In an article titled “Outsourced in Michigan” written for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty chronicles the movement among Michigan’s community colleges to outsource the hiring of adjunct faculty and the management of related “payroll duties” to a corporation called EDUStaff. EDUStaff had previously specialized in providing substitute teachers for K-12 systems. So, if you have…

The Emotional Wellbeing of Non-Tenure Track Faculty

A recently released research article in the July issue of Frontiers in Psychology, authored by Gretchen M. Reevy and Grace Deason, finds that the nature of non-tenure-track employment—now a reality for some 70% of higher education faculty members in the U.S.—brings with it an increase in stress, depression, and anxiety. Appropriately titled “Predictors of depression, stress,…

Update from Northern New Mexico College

In its July 9 issue, the Albuquerque Journal-News reports that the administration at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) is now complaining about being inundated with public-records requests. Written by T.S. Last, the article “NNMC Claims That It Is Overburdened by IPRA Requests” is available at: http://www.abqjournal.com/426873/abqnewsseeker/nnmc-claims-its-overburdened-by-ipra-requests.html. (IPRA apparently is the acronym for Inspection of Public…