BY HANK REICHMAN Fifty years ago today, on April 23, 1968, members of the Students Afro-American Society (SAS) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their supporters at Columbia University occupied Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate classroom and administration building, demanding an end to construction of a segregated university gymnasium on public park land…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The AAUP has joined with the American Council on Education and 32 other higher education groups in submitting an amicus brief on March 28, 2018, to the US Supreme Court opposing the Trump administration’s recent proclamation instituting a travel ban. The current iteration of the travel ban, introduced on September 24,…
BY HANK REICHMAN In February, George Mason University students filed a lawsuit against their school and its fundraising arm, the George Mason University Foundation, in hopes of obtaining grant and gift agreements between private donors and the Foundation. Transparent GMU, the student organization that filed the suit, is worried about the potential for private donors…
BY AARON BARLOW The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure argues that: Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a member of the Academe advisory board. Part I of this two-part series may be found here. Responding to Bulk Cuts in Qualitative Fields: the…
BY STEVEN LUBET Guest blogger Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor of Law at Northwestern University and the author most recently of Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters (Oxford University Press, 2017). The Kentucky General Assembly recently passed a budget that reduces funding for higher education by 6.25 percent, and will require cuts of as much as…
BY JOHN K. WILSON This afternoon (Thurs. April 19 at 1:30pm ET), AAUP political organizer Monica Owens will be holding a Facebook Live event about the threat from legislating free speech. It’s an important time to address these issues, especially since South Carolina has become the first state to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Many public research universities face a dilemma: how to balance a commitment to educate in-state students with the value that out-of-state applicants contribute to the university. As Nick Anderson illustrates recently in the Washington Post, the facts are clear. Public (and private) research universities contribute mightily to a state’s economy, providing a…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I wonder if the $43,000 “secure” phone booth that Scott Pruitt had installed in his office looks anything like this: (If the image is more puzzling than amusing, do a Google search for Get Smart and the “cone of silence.”)
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In today’s Dayton Daily News, Max Filby’s article “Wright State Was Warned a Year Ago That More Cuts Were Needed” includes, as a sort of appendix, two timelines: WSU Total Reserves 2012: $162 million 2013: $140 million 2014: $135 million 2015: $109 million 2016: $64 million 2017: $31 million* *Projection from FY 2018 budget. WSU Budget…