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…
BY JASON ELIAS Faculty members at the University of New Mexico have been talking to their colleagues for the past two years about the possibility of organizing a union to strengthen their voice on campus. A clear majority of the 1,600 faculty members support this move, and the United Academics of the University of New…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As it enters week 3, the promising new series Operation Varsity Blues is running out of gas. The story of wealthy white folks…
BY SHANNON DEA Shannon Dea is associate professor of philosophy and vice-president of the faculty association at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The following is re-posted with permission from University Affairs/Affaires Universitaires (universityaffairs.ca). Last month I had the privilege and honor of participating in and speaking at the triennial Harry Crowe Conference, sponsored by…