POSTED BY SARAH MINK Spring 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 2 The spring 2021 issue of Academe builds on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education launched earlier this year by the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and other allies. Contributors to the issue respond to the crisis now confronting higher education, calling for bold…
BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE Last summer, even as COVID-19 cases were surging, university leaders in North Carolina tried to engineer a return to normal by August 2020. It famously failed. Soon after the start of the semester yielded a burst of COVID-19 clusters, the state’s two flagship universities, UNC–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, shut…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference is in June, and there’s just one week left to submit a proposal for a paper presentation on a topic relating to academic governance. Authors are encouraged to explore connections between their institutions and other institutions, and to consider the application of AAUP governance policies. Possible areas of focus…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Here are some events happening in the next month that relate to free expression and academic freedom issues and may interest AcademeBlog readers (followed by some recordings of events held earlier this year, and deadlines for some proposals and grants. Readers are encouraged to mention additional events in the comments. Below…
BY HANK REICHMAN On March 17, President Elizabeth Hillman of Mills College announced that the trustees of the 169-year-old women’s college in Oakland, California, had decided to close admissions after this year and stop conferring degrees no later than Fall 2023, thereby effectively closing the school. According to Hillman, an undefined “Mills Institute” will continue…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Dear Colleagues, Are you troubled by the direction that the University of Maryland has headed in recent years? We are. In March 2021, we relaunched the University of Maryland Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (UMD AAUP) because we believe a different university is possible.…
BY THE AAUP We stand in sorrow and solidarity with Asian and Asian-American communities, who are facing an escalating series of racist attacks, including this week’s horrific attack in Georgia, in which anti-Asian racism compounded with misogyny evidently resulted in the murder of eight people. Anti-Asian racism has been a recurring theme in United States…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. The walkout comes more than four years after student workers voted to unionize, forming the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The sobering social and economic costs of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. The challenge for teachers to keep working via Zoom are not so much physical now, as they are mental and emotional, especially for those of us used to teaching face-to-face in classrooms. Being in Zoom rooms too often…
BY DEBORAH CAFIERO During the COVID-19 crisis, the pace of cuts to foreign language departments and programs, already brisk before the pandemic, has accelerated. The devaluation of language study is necessary, so the argument goes, to reduce costs and trim programs that elicit minimal student interest. Besides, English is becoming the lingua franca of the…