BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Hauling rocks. Nailing fence posts. Painting walls. Babysitting. Folding sweaters. Making photocopies. Cleaning horse stalls. Laying sod. Pouring coffee. Packaging candies. Watering plants. Driving UPS vans. Delivering pizzas. Delivering flowers. This is just a short list of what many of America’s 768,000 college teachers will be doing this summer to try to…
BY MARJORIE HEINS Guest blogger Marjorie Heins is the author of six books about civil liberties and civil rights, including Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge, and, most recently, Ironies and Complications of Free Speech. Some issues in the American free-speech universe never die. Does teaching “creation science”…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL When its trustees shut down Mount Ida College, they unleashed a debacle that resulted in a torrent of criticism and considerable finger pointing. Rejecting a merger or acquisition (depending on the characterization) with Lasell College, the trustees opted to sell the campus to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose leadership…
POSTED BY THE AAUP We have great news to report! Yesterday, faculty at both the Oregon Institute of Technology and Oregon State University moved to form unions affiliated with the AAUP. With this, faculty at all public universities in the state have joined together in unions in an effort to protect quality higher education and…
BY KELLY HAND You’re probably all too familiar with the common misperception that academics have a cushy schedule. If you are only in class fifteen or fewer hours per week and do not teach at all during winter, spring, and summer breaks, the assumption is that you can do whatever you want with your abundant…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT Guest blogger Robert A. Scott is President Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus, Adelphi University, and Author, How University Boards Work, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. I was recently part of a team engaged to review a regional teaching university with a new president who wants his institution to become a research university…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL The following is an excerpt of my address to graduate students at the University of Rochester commencement. My full remarks are available here. I suspect that one of the reasons that the University asked me to serve as your speaker is that I have had many opportunities to re-invent myself in…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Today the AAUP issued, jointly with Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the following statement on the liberal arts disciplines. Beneath the statement there is an online form that allows you to sign on to show your support. In recent years, the disciplines of the liberal arts, once universally regarded as central to…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Joe Knott, one of the Republicans who dominate the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, published an op-ed on May 25 that imagines an alarming future for higher education under the headline “We need more conservative professors. Here’s how we can do that at UNC.” Knott generously declares his support for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This headline is from today’s Wonkette newsletter: Michael Cohen’s Tell-All Book Has Been Cancelled. Sorry, Pulitzer Committee! Wonkette is available at: https://wonkette.com/. It is in the same vein as The Onion but much nastier and unrestrained: that is, I sometimes cringe or flinch right before I laugh out loud—that is, at…