BY HANK REICHMAN A controversial set of policies governing tenure at University of Wisconsin System schools that may threaten academic freedom were endorsed without debate Friday by a Board of Regents committee. “I’m stunned,” UW-Madison professor David Vanness, President of the UW-Madison AAUP, said of the swift approval. “I wonder whether due diligence is being…
The AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin today issued the following statement on draft policies on tenure issued by University of Wisconsin regents, which incorporate a number of sound elements, but fall short in other areas. To download the statement as a .pdf file, go here. For more on these proposals see UW-Milwaukee AAUP…
BY AARON BARLOW The crisis is upon us. It has been building—the pressure on a fault line—for at least 45 years, certainly since the Powell Memo of 1971. By soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, it includes this: One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates,…
BY AARON BARLOW On January 26, I posted Professor Rob Latham’s statement concerning his possible firing to the University of California Board of Regents. Though tenured, he was fired. There has been great interest in Latham’s statement (as can be seen in the comments). In response, and after what I’ve heard was a contentious meeting,…
BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
Among the most controversial and widely publicized controversies during the recent autumn of student unrest was that surrounding the incident at Yale University, where a residence hall adviser’s email about Halloween costumes prompted a national debate over the allegedly competing values of free speech and racial justice. I previously commented at some length on the…
The College of Saint Rose (NY) faces a $9.3 million deficit and declining enrollment. “It’s a challenging time in higher education and it’s not for the faint of heart,” President Carolyn Stefanco recently remarked. “Change is really hard for people, and higher education is changing in pretty dramatic ways.” As reported by the Chronicle, the…
Academic Analytics, a private database contracted to measure faculty productivity at Rutgers, may undermine our tenure process, while narrowing the range of scholarship. If you belong to SASNB [School of Arts and Sciences—New Brunswick], please attend the School’s faculty meeting on Monday, 14 December from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in Voorhees 105 (College Ave.) to vote on…
This is a guest post by Timothy Shiell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Stout and a member of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee for the Defense of the Professional Rights of Philosophers. He is a scholar of and advocate for academic freedom and the author of Campus Hate Speech on Trial. Another…