BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Loyola Phoenix, the student newspaper of Loyola University Chicago, published a remarkable editorial about the repressive media policy on campus. Loyola’s communications spokesperson, Evangeline Politis, had written to the student newspaper recently, angry that student journalists had dared to ask questions to faculty and staff at Loyola: “This…
BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON Is it possible to go a month without a controversy about the extramural speech of a faculty member? Probably not. There are, after all, a lot of faculty out there, and they have greater unmediated access than ever before to put their views about matters both great and small before a…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND Winter 2019 | Vol. 105, No. 1 This issue of Academe addresses the questions of speech that have fueled the culture wars on college campuses in recent years. Articles discuss the assault on the public mission of higher education; the implications of a polarized political climate for faculty members, administrators, and students; and…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Stanley Kurtz is at it again: He has another bad idea for unnecessary and counterproductive legislation. In the past, he’s sought to impose mandatory penalties on disruptive protesters and rules for institutional neutrality. This time, it’s an attempt to force public colleges to have more debates and conservative speakers by enacting…
POSTED BY AAUP STAFF A clear majority of faculty at the University of New Mexico have declared their support for unionization in an official election petition filed today with the UNM Labor Management Relations Board. The UNM bargaining unit, comprising more than 1,600 full- and part-time faculty on five campuses—UNM’s main campus, in Albuquerque; UNM-Gallup;…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today Democracy Now!, the daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Rutgers University professor Juan González, ran a feature about the strike at Wright State University, which featured an interview with AAUP President and chief Wright State negotiator Rudy Fichtenbaum. You can watch it here:
BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER According to an AAUP investigative report released today, the most plausible explanation for the dismissal of a faculty member from Nunez Community College was that it occurred as a retaliatory measure, violating his academic freedom. Professor Richard Schmitt, a nontenured associate professor of English with twenty-two years of service at the institution,…
BY TOM ROONEY With permission, we are sharing the text of a Facebook post by Tom Rooney, AAUP-WSU treasurer and member of the union’s negotiating team. He wrote it this morning, after Wright State University faculty and the WSU administration came to a tentative agreement, ending the faculty strike that began on January 22. A journey…
BY AAUP STAFF Congratulations to Wright State University faculty for a hard-fought agreement with the administration! The AAUP-WSU strike is over and faculty returned to work this morning in a victory for faculty, students, and quality higher education. The blog includes a number of recent posts about the strike. Below are links to just a…
BY HANK REICHMAN This week the New York Times reported that the University Senate at American University in Cairo (AUC) had on February 5 “voted overwhelmingly” to declare no confidence in the university’s president, Francis Ricciardone, a former United States ambassador to Egypt, Turkey and the Philippines and Palau. In the resolution, the Times reported,…