BY JOHN K. WILSON Earlier this month, Dixie State University (DSU) in Utah announced the suspension and planned termination of music department chair Glenn Webb and director of vocal activities Ken Peterson. But the reasons for this extreme action are quite dubious, and the violations of academic freedom, due process, and DSU policies are alarming.…
BY DON ERON As someone who has long agitated for tenure-eligibility for all faculty members (after the successful completion of a probationary period), I have heard many counterarguments. Some of these—particularly coming from tenured faculty, who, as a cohort, tend toward opposition—are so obviously spurious, to say nothing of sanctimonious, that they dissipate of their…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Activists have been fighting for years for decent working conditions and pay for adjuncts and graduate student instructors. The majority of these activists are adjuncts and graduate students themselves. They have formed collective bargaining units under the auspices of the AAUP and other unions, and they have created organizations such as the…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ On July 10, 2017, the AAUP submitted comments to the American Bar Association opposing proposed revisions to the ABA’s accreditation standards that would eliminate a requirement that full-time faculty “teach more than one-half of the total credit hours offered by the law school in a year or more than two-thirds of student…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent yesterday to the Trustees, President, and Provost of Mills College by the chair of the University of California at Berkeley Department of Philosophy. A philosopher was among the five faculty members laid off last month by Mills trustees as part of a…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was sent via email on Monday, July 10 by the University of California at Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA): To: Elizabeth Hillman, President, Mills College Board of Trustees, Mills College CC: Roger Sparks, Chair, Faculty Executive Committee Chinyere Oparah, Provost and Dean of the Faculty The Berkeley Faculty…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I reported on the layoff of five tenured professors at Mills College in Oakland, California. Although Mills’ action has failed to receive coverage in either the higher education press or the local media, as of this writing my post has been viewed more than 36,000 times. Yet Mills may not…
BY HANK REICHMAN On June 26, the board of trustees of Mills College, meeting behind closed doors, approved a vaguely formulated “Financial Stabilization Plan” (FSP) previously rejected overwhelmingly by the institution’s faculty. The plan calls for reducing the number of departments from 18 to 13 and the number of schools from four to three. Two…
BY HANK REICHMAN In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post a few days ago, Jeffrey Selingo, a former editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a number of suggestions for how colleges and universities might cut costs. Instead of “always looking at the revenue side of the ledger by figuring out how to attract…