BY AARON BARLOW From a novel called The Spiral Road by Jan de Hartog, I learned that a physician’s diagnosis doesn’t depend as much on knowledge of medicine as it does on knowledge of the patient. I was a high-school student at the time and on a de Hartog kick–but I’ve never forgotten that lesson and still…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Almost lost in all of the attention to the special congressional election in Ohio’s 12th district has been a major push-back against the Right’s attacks on union rights. Voters in Missouri repealed, by an overwhelmingly majority in a referendum, the right-to-work statute that had been passed by the GOP dominated legislature.…
In our new book — How to Run a College: A Practical Guide for Trustees, Faculty, Staff and Policymakers — Dr. Joey King and I argue that governance is the worst problem affecting American higher education. Most Trustees Unschooled About Institutional Issues Most trustees are notoriously unschooled about the issues that affect their institutions. They…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN At the AAUP’s annual conference in June Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was the plenary luncheon speaker. Chapter 7 of her book was published separately…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Agents of Change, the documentary film about the late 1960s student rebellions at San Francisco State and Cornell Universities, which led to the establishment of Black Studies programs at both schools, is now available on DVD. The film was shown to enthusiastic audiences at the AAUP’s 2015 and 2016 Summer Institutes.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Dixie State University (DSU) in Utah, after trying and failing to fire music professor Ken Peterson for the crime of gossip, is now declaring that Peterson, to keep his job, must sign a “Last Chance Agreement” that is one of the most extreme violations of academic freedom and free speech that…
BY HANK REICHMAN President Donald Trump has said many, many moronic things, but his tweet this weekend about the raging wildfires in California must be one of his dumbest. “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be…
POSTED BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM The Rider University AAUP chapter is circulating a petition calling on the Rider board of trustees to stop the university’s proposed sale of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, to Kaiwen, a Chinese for-profit company with no experience in higher education. The costly negotiations for the deal, which is detrimental…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This item is a news update from the Boston Globe that was distributed today: White people need to stop reinforcing the stereotype that White people are not just stupid but ridiculously so. If I feel that I need to apologize for being White, it is because some people seem almost willfully…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ AND AARON NISENSON The AAUP joined with the American Council on Education and thirty-five other higher education associations in filing an amicus brief in federal court this week opposing a challenge to race-based admissions at Harvard University. We argue that “a diverse student body is essential to educational objectives of colleges and universities,…