BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AND PAUL DAVIS At their November 2018 meetings, the Council of the AAUP and the AAUP-CBC Executive Committee voted overwhelmingly to move forward with changes to our shared organizational structure. The changes, should they be approved at the June 2019 annual meeting, will streamline our governance and organizational structure. As is the…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL At the most expensive U.S. colleges and universities, the advertised price now exceeds $70,000 per annum although most institutions are significantly below this level. Financial aid lowers the actual cost of attendance for many students. Still, American families are less willing to shoulder the expected family contributions that make a college…
BY LLUIS DE YZAGUIRRE I MAURA In the last few weeks, academics from all over the world have expressed their deep concern about the decision by the Spanish judiciary to prosecute two political science scholars and two law scholars based at three different universities in Barcelona. To draw attention to this fact they have published…
BY RICHARD GRUSIN The following is reposted with permission from the blog of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee AAUP chapter. Richard Grusin is Distinguished Professor of English at UWM. On Pearl Harbor Day, 2018, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents dropped its own economic bomb on the people of Wisconsin, approving raises ranging from $14,421…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the company that owns and publishes the Arkansas Times filed suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of a state law requiring government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel or reduce their fees by at least 20 percent. The Times initiated the suit after the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two faculty members dismissed from their positions in apparent violation of their academic freedom have won restitution. A professor in Kentucky, who had criticized the governor’s Medicaid plan, won a substantial financial settlement and a return to his university, while a California community college professor fired for challenging student beliefs about sexuality…
BY HANK REICHMAN On September 6, 2018, the student newspaper at the University of North Alabama (UNA), The Flor-Ala, reported that the school’s administration had improperly withheld public documents about the resignation of the vice president of student affairs. A week later, the student journalists, members of the communications department, and The Flor-Ala media adviser…
BY LISA MINNICK On the sixth anniversary of anti-union “right to work” legislation being signed into law in Michigan, we share this letter to Western Michigan University faculty from WMU-AAUP president Lisa Minnick, who is stepping down after serving in the role since 2013. The letter originally appeared on the chapter’s website, where there is…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a year ago the AAUP released a report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The report documented “the Trump administration’s alarming hostility to science” in international scientific exchange and the field of climate…
BY HANK REICHMAN On December 1, Central European University (CEU) announced that, after a lengthy struggle, it would abandon its Budapest campus and relocate to Vienna. “Basically this is a dark day for freedom in Hungary,” said Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of CEU. “And it’s a dark day for academic freedom.” CEU said…