BY MARK JAMES Two days after news broke that the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina voted to offer Nikole Hannah-Jones the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism without the protections of tenure, Inside Higher Ed published my article in which I described being called into a meeting because a parent had…
BY HASSAN MELEHY By now, the decision by the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees to refuse a tenured professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones is a well-known story. One trustee, speaking anonymously, made clear that the motive was “politics.” In North Carolina we’re familiar with the right-wing policymaking that governs us: one of its major sources is…
BY JENNIFER RUTH UNC-CH Board of Trustees’ decision to deny Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure over the explicit recommendation of the university’s faculty and administration dramatically illustrates the danger of giving Boards authority over academic hiring. (They offered her a five year position, with the possibility of a tenure review during that period.) In…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This news release is from the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron: The University of Akron Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (Akron-AAUP) has created a one-time donation fund, the “Akron-AAUP Faculty Care Fund”. The fund is an act of support for the 66 University of Akron (UA)…
BY MARYBETH GASMAN All one has to do in order to understand the depth of anxiety felt by assistant professors on the tenure track is to spend an hour on Twitter following the hashtags #academictwitter or #academicchatter. Tenure-track faculty members are feeling uncertain, stressed, overworked, and frightened of the tenure process and its unforgiving inhumanity.…
BY THE AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES On Friday, March 5, 2021, Iowa lawmakers vote on legislation that would end tenure for faculty at Iowa’s three public universities. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) issued the following letter to leaders of the Iowa House of Representatives and State Senate, as well as Governor Kim…
BY LOIS COX AND KATHERINE TACHAU With the permission of the authors, we are reprinting this letter to the editor, published by Little Village four years after an earlier version had been published in the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Daily Iowan. They sent their letter on behalf of the AAUP chapters at the University…
POSTED BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Below is a letter sent last week by the AAUP Colorado Conference to James W. C. White, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His reported plan to reduce tenure and tenure-track positions has received local and national coverage. James W. C.…
BY HUEY-LI LI In the middle of World War II, the AAUP published its oft-quoted 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in order to “promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities.” In response to the outbreak of the…
BY SUE RAMLO On July 15th, 2020, our worlds turned upside down. Fear filled discussions about a faculty cut list had been circulating for more than a few months. It seemed as if every faculty member assumed that they were on that list of faculty to be laid off. Faculty were brooding, panicking, and anxious,…