POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Dear Colleagues, I just signed the campaign: Healthcare Workers Need Protective Equipment Now. It is being distributed by AFT and other groups. It would mean the world to me if you could also add your name to this important issue. Every name that is added builds momentum around the campaign and…
BY NOAH ZATZ The following is reposted with permission from The Faculty Lounge. Noah Zatz is professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. The post is edited lightly from a letter to the UCLA administrative and faculty leadership, and posted on his Facebook page. I am of the firm and strong view that…
BY HENNING SCHROEDER In recent COVID-19 updates, the president’s office at the University of Minnesota announced that graduation ceremonies planned for May 2020 will need to be canceled, postponed, or “socially distant.” This is truly sad news for our students, their friends, their relatives, and the entire university community. Similar decisions are being made at…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN This video has been making the rounds. Thanks to U of Iowa AAUP’s Linda Kerber for forwarding to me.
BY KAITLIN POMERANTZ The following is reposted with permission from Hyperallergic, “a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society.” Kaitlin Pomerantz is an artist and educator in Philadelphia. In the short story “Swim Team,” by Miranda July, the protagonist teaches a group of people in a land-locked town to swim without…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The coronavirus pandemic has hit. The nation and the economy are in a free fall. Your college has closed and your college administration is announcing how there is nothing to see over here because the faculty—those miraculous, mythical, shapeshifting creatures—have morphed overnight from classroom teachers to “online educators” engaged in “online learning”…
BY AARON BARLOW Listen to our students. That’s the best way for us teachers to craft a successful end to a disrupted semester in a nation in crisis. After Kent State in 1970, we students at Utica College (like our contemporaries all over the country) shut our campus down. Under the leadership of faculty, however,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I last night were looking for entertainment and stumbled upon a 1921 silent film classic, The Blot, on Turner Classic Movies. Almost totally by chance we watched a few moments of TCM’s intro and soon were hooked. The Blot was directed by…
BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…
BY AARON BARLOW The need to migrate our courses online for a period of time, be it several weeks or the rest of the semester, has forced us to focus on something other than our primary task of teaching. We are having to turn our attention to a vehicle for instruction that many of us…