BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Faculty salaries barely budged when adjusted for inflation during the 2018-2019 academic year, according to the AAUP’s 2018-19 Faculty Compensation Survey. Average salaries for full-time faculty members at US colleges and universities are 2 percent higher in 2018-19 than they were in the preceding academic year, but with prices in the economy…
BY MONICA BLACK, BEN LEE, AND MARY MCALPIN Ever since students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, began organizing an annual event called Sex Week, state lawmakers have been trying to kill it. According to the students who organize it, the aim of Sex Week, which ran from March 31 to April 5 this year,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Two cancelled speeches last week, at Beloit College and Columbia University, have brought new attention to the issue of censoring speakers. At Beloit College, a speech by Erik Prince was cancelled out of fear of student protesters. At Columbia University, a panel about censorship in Turkey was cancelled because the administration…
BY AARON BARLOW One of the more depressing articles I’ve read recently—outside of politics—is Kevin Carey’s “The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education” for Huffington Post. He writes: Instead of students receiving a reasonably priced, quality online degree, universities are using them as cash cows while corporate middlemen…
BY JULIE SCHMID As we move into the final months of the academic year, I wanted to share updates about three recent wins. These three successes emphasize the power of collective action and solidarity—among chapter members; among the national AAUP and our state conferences and chapters; and among faculty, students, and the community—when we all…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AND PAUL DAVIS As we shared with members in December 2018, the AAUP Council and the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress Executive Committee voted in November to move forward with changes that will streamline our shared organizational structure. Following that vote, these governing bodies directed that detailed revisions to governing documents and other…
BY HANK REICHMAN Be forewarned! This post is an act of shameless self-promotion. That’s because it announces that today, April 2, is the official publication date of my new book The Future of Academic Freedom. Consisting of ten interlinked essays–the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, calls them “audacious”–the book “aims to bring to discussions of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today was a big day for University of California librarians. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the system’s librarians have been negotiating a new contract and that one of the contentious issues was academic freedom, which UC negotiators initially claimed did not apply to librarians. (For previous coverage see…
BY HANK REICHMAN You may recall the case of Courtney Lawton, a part-time lecturer and doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who in August 2017 received threats after a video recording of her participation in a demonstration protesting an on-campus recruitment table for Turning Point USA was disseminated on the internet. The university suspended…
BY LEO WELCH Leo Welch is the Vice President of the Illinois AAUP. The anti-union right-wing Republicans finally got a U.S. Supreme Court decision that they predicted would destroy unions once and for all. The Janus decision was preceded by two other attempts which included Abood v. Detroit Board of Education which held that union…