BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court in a narrow 5-4 ruling capped a week of outrageous decisions by declaring agency fee payments by non-union members unconstitutional in the public sector. The ruling, which overturned a unanimous 1977 decision supported by such conservative luminaries as William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger,…
BY AARON BARLOW This afternoon, from 5:30 to 6:30, union members in New York City protested outside of the Federal Courts in lower Manhattan. The event, organized by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty union of the City University of New York, drew hundreds of frustrated and angry people in what is surely one…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Several years ago, I spoke to a group of extraordinarily bright, committed colleagues from across a group of neighboring colleges and universities in a large metropolitan area. The subject – collaboration — was a precursor to a larger conversation about whether they might consider a merger of like-minded institutions to create…
POSTED BY STEVE MUMME AND MARGARET LECOMPTE Steve Mumme is a Professor at Colorado State University and the AAUP-Colorado Conference Co-President, and Margaret LeCompte is a Professor Emerita and President of the AAUP Chapter, University of Colorado at Boulder. Colorado’s college students are deemed by some to be civics deficient and University of Colorado Board of Regents…
BY HANK REICHMAN University of California President and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been a leader among university administrators in opposing the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants, most recently speaking forcefully to denounce the administration’s hideous policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Now UC faculty are calling on Napolitano…
BY HANK REICHMAN My title–at least the first part–comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical of the 1960s, now I suspect embarrassingly dated (although it’s been revived as recently as 2011), that I adored in high school. But this post comes in response to an op-ed piece published two days ago in the Dallas Morning…
POSTED BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY The following is a condensed version of an address made by AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum to the AAUP’s 104th Annual Meeting on June 16. We are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that will likely have a profound effect on the way that most unions in the public sector operate, and it…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the report of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, presented to the AAUP annual meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on June 16 and to be published in the annual AAUP Bulletin issue of Academe later this summer. Introduction In the past year Committee A published several policy documents…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The failure to grow net tuition revenue is an existential threat to America’s colleges and universities. Most are overwhelmingly dependent upon tuition, fees, and room and board to support the educational program that they offer. Colleges operate with fixed costs in labor, benefits, land, state and federal reporting requirements, and debt…
BY JOERG TIEDE Delegates to the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors voted today to remove the University of Iowa from the list of sanctioned institutions as well as to remove Stillman College from the list of censured administrations. The AAUP places academic institutions on the sanction list for serious departures…