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…
BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
BY HANK REICHMAN This afternoon I had the pleasure of joining a demonstration of University of California librarians and their supporters outside the Berkeley campus’s Doe Library where the latest bargaining session between the UC-AFT Librarians and the UC administration was taking place. As I previously reported, academic freedom is a central topic of negotiation. …