BY CORINNE WEISGERBER The following remarks were presented on Saturday, June 15, at the AAUP’s 105th annual meeting, which voted to place St. Edward’s University on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations. You can read the report of the AAUP’s investigating committee here. I stand here today to express my gratitude to the AAUP for…
BY STEVEN LUBET When the University of Alabama returned over $21 million to its largest-ever single donor, and removed his name from its law school, it either was or wasn’t because of his outspoken opposition to the state’s ultra-restrictive new abortion law. According to Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., “the administrators at the university [chose] zealotry over…
BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY We are pleased to announce that the AAUP will be moving forward with organizational changes after affirmative votes at last week’s AAUP annual meeting and AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress regular meeting. Both bodies voted overwhelmingly to proceed with a package of changes that combines the AAUP-CBC and the AAUP. The AAUP-CBC will…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This afternoon, Oberlin College was hit by a jury with $33 million in punitive damages added on to the June 7 judgment of $11.2 million for defamation. (The punitive damages will probably be reduced to $22.4 million under state law, but perhaps $10 million in plaintiff legal fees will also be…
BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER (Cross-posted from Language Politics) “[F]ixed terms of members of boards shall expire on May 1.” So says Wis. stat. 15.07(1)(c), the portion of state law that governs when the terms of state board members—including members of the UW System Board of Regents—come to an end. So it was curious to see that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two days ago I posted a piece on this blog about graduate student debt in which I cited an article in the New York Times that reported, among other things, that students in an online social work program at the University of Southern California (USC) averaged an extraordinary $109,486 in student loan…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, the Department of Education released new data about levels of student debt in various academic programs. Writing in the New York Times, Kevin Carey, who directs the education policy program at New America, suggests that the move is part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. The department is already…
BY STEVEN LUBET Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. University graduation addresses are famously bland, featuring acknowledgements and congratulations, perhaps leavened with benign humor, balanced with vague calls to public service, and rounded off with sunny assurances of a bright future. If not exactly an art form,…
BY PATRICK FESSENBECKER It is the time of year again when too many brilliant literature scholars find out that they will not be receiving a tenure-track job, and, as in Jacquelyn Ardam’s eloquent lamentation, that their possibilities for staying in the profession are over. The statistics on the situation are stark. Humanities doctorates are taking…
BY THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The AAUP is not solely a faculty organization. It exists to protect the speech of all members of the academic community, and it must speak in defense of student voices, who are among the most vulnerable, and often the most subject to censure from university administrators.…