POSTED BY MARTIN KICH As musicians and other performing artists cope with the abrupt interruption of their professional lives, clips of bands and orchestras performing together while apart have become, delightfully, much more commonplace. But this video, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the recording of The Band’s signature song, “The Weight,” was released last September,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH If one showed most Americans this photo, they would have no idea who the woman was: If one added this next photo, a few might guess that she was Eleanor Roosevelt, standing in the background as her husband signed another piece of landmark New Deal legislation: But, much like Eleanor Roosevelt,…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement of solidarity with essential workers today: We all have been touched by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Our system of higher education has been upended in the course of only a few weeks. AAUP members in medical school and health center chapters and…
BY THE AAUP RESEARCH OFFICE For our annual Faculty Compensation Survey, the AAUP collected data from 928 colleges and universities across the United States, including community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and major research universities. The 2019–20 survey covers almost 380,000 full-time and more than 96,000 part-time faculty members, as well as senior administrators at…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Because so many conferences and events have been cancelled, I wanted to provide some online events and resources dealing with academic freedom and free expression on campus. Below are some suggestions for content about campus free speech issues, including upcoming events, free online resources, recent presentations at conferences, and podcasts. (Note…
BY JONATHAN REES Guest blogger Jonathan Rees teaches at Colorado State University-Pueblo Do you remember Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs)? 2012 was supposedly the “Year of the MOOC” because they were going to revolutionize higher education. By teaching at scale, matching a few superstar professors with thousands of students at a time, the argument…
BY AARON BARLOW Those advocating a permanent move online for a much greater proportion of college classes are, I think, purposefully conflating two different needs in their quest. The first is the need for all teachers to be comfortable using digital tools, something we all have been woefully remiss in fulfilling. The second is the…
BY BETHANY L. LETIECQ AND JUDITH A. WILDE This is the second in a series of three George Mason-AAUP Academe Blog posts on lessons learned from the presidential search campaign. Read the first post on GMU’s campaign here. Over the past year, two of the Washington, DC, region’s largest public universities lost their presidents. The…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from Remaking the University. Michael Meranze is Professor of History and Chair of the Academic Senate at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. COVID-19 has brutally laid bare the devastating impact of several decades of privatization and capitalist globalization.…
BY AARON BARLOW The organization Tenure for the Common Good has issued a Statement on Equitiy and Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Follow the link to read the whole of it, but here are the first few paragraphs: The COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges to higher education. Tens of thousands of faculty are suddenly moving…