BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER I didn’t think it could happen to a student of mine. I know the statistics: the United States incarcerates more people than any other country on the planet, both per capita and in total numbers. There are nearly two and half million people behind bars in our country; currently 65 million Americans…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a talk delivered at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on May 20, 2019. My thanks to the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment for hosting the talk as part of its colloquia series and to the UCLA Faculty Association and Professors…
BY SIOBHAN SENIER The end of May is a time when most faculty are recharging after final grading and commencement, but it’s also a great time to take stock and plan for a change. Have you ever thought about lending your voice to defend higher education as a public good? Does it feel like you…
POSTED BY JOAN W. SCOTT In March, Rachel Ida Buff published an Academe Blog post recounting the attacks by the Canary Mission and others on faculty at Kingsborough Community College. In response to the attack, a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students decided to greet the incoming chancellor, Felix Matos (a “veteran” administrator in…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Steven Thrasher, a student graduation speaker who received his Ph.D. from New York University last week, sparked enormous controversy with his speech. Thrasher expressed support for “the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Apartheid State Government in Israel” and declared, “We must stand together to vanquish racism and Islamophobia…
BY JOHN T. MCNAY The growing obsession on the part of college and university administrations with secrecy, which I address in my recent Academe article, “Ohio AAUP Chapters Contend with Secretive Searches,” is indicative of a larger issue. The continual adoption of corporate models is undermining the academic mission at our institutions. Even corporations, when…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning debated proper salad preparation techniques on May 16. That’s because they spent two hours discussing whether James M. Thomas should be granted tenure despite his criticism of Republican legislators. Ultimately, Thomas was allowed to receive tenure (with an untold number…
BY JANE M. FRASER This blog post is based on a speech the author made at a retirement celebration for her on April 30. Some people are unprincipled. I don’t mean that in the usual sense of that word. I simply mean that they don’t use principles in decision making. They don’t think about which…
BY HANK REICHMAN In Fall 2017 the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP-affiliated union representing nearly 28,000 California State University (CSU) faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches, and CSU management agreed to extend their collective bargaining agreement. As part of that agreement, the sides agreed to continue negotiations over academic freedom and intellectual property with the…
BY HANK REICHMAN The late UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr once famously quipped that “the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Only the last of these, he suggested, presented a problem. Another related saying attributed to him was his description…