BY KELLY HAND The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) recently released a research brief analyzing results of a survey of humanities PhD recipients who were three, eight, and fifteen years out of programs at thirty-five institutions. With a data sample of 882 respondents, the report focuses on PhDs working in academic and nonacademic jobs “closely…
BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU, STANFORD UNIVERSITY The punishment of John Cheney-Lippold, a University of Michigan professor who declined to write a letter of recommendation for a student who wished to study in Israel, has grown in a particularly ugly and disturbing manner. Cheney-Lippold is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) that argues…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND The AAUP released an open letter to US congressman Jeff Fortenberry letting him know that threatening and harassing faculty members is unacceptable after Fortenberry’s chief of staff harassed Ari Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. After Kohen “liked” on Facebook an image of an altered…
BY LEO WELCH In recent history, Illinois’ support for higher education has shown little growth and in fact has lagged far behind inflation. Susana Mendoza, Illinois Comptroller, released a report on September 20, 2018 on the Consequences of Illinois’ 2015-2017 Budget Impasse and Fiscal Outlook. The full report includes the background and history of Illinois’…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators and Policymakers, Dr. Joey King and I make a case that colleges must begin to reimagine themselves by rethinking their operating models. Reduce Dependence on Tuition Revenue It no longer makes sense to depend so heavily on tuition…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Many people on AcademeBlog, including Hank Reichman, have made interesting comments on the so-called “Sokal squared” hoax. Earlier this month, I was a discussant at a session focusing on the hoax at FIRE’s annual faculty conference, and I think it’s important to discuss the academic freedom implications of the hoax. I have…
BY HANK REICHMAN As a retired faculty member I don’t attend too many scholarly conferences these days, outside of the AAUP of course. But I do still enjoy the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and plan to attend this year’s gathering in Boston, December 6-9. But like…
BY MONICA OWENS In support of the launch of our national Education Not Privatization campaign this week we interviewed David Hughes, vice president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers University to learn more about how the Rutgers chapter successfully organized to defend academic freedom and exercised oversight of online offerings in the Rutgers-Pearson eCollege contract.…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In our new book, How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Administrators and Policymakers, Dr. W. Joseph King and I assert that the current operating model by which colleges meet their expenses no longer works. This financial crisis is best viewed through one revealing statistic – the…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a recent “Data Snapshot” the AAUP’s Research Department took a look at the data around tenure and the casualization of faculty labor, finding that “the percentage of instructional positions that is off the tenure track amounted to 73 percent in 2016, the latest year for which data are available.” At Ph.D-granting…