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…
BY AARON BARLOW Since the beginning of my academic career, I have intertwined the personal with my objects of study. After tentative moves toward some nonsense dissertation related to literary theory, I chucked it all and wrote on my favorite science-fiction writer. That, as they say, was my ‘defining moment.’ At the time, there was…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Our extended and ongoing contract impasse and our even more extended and ongoing contract campaign have made us aware of many opportunities that we have missed to connect more effectively with our members, with constituencies within our university community, and with groups in the communities that our university serves. As a…
Our AAUP chapters of the CCCS, now with members at six of the 13 colleges within the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) are celebrating our fifth year of organizing CCCS faculty. We have been advocating for equitable wages, health-care benefits and due process rights through five years of potlucks, pub crawls, Scrabble games, coffee klatches,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a piece for the Undernews daily newsletter from the Progressive Review, Sam Smith recalls his activism in the 1960s and how the traumatic events of 1968 affected him and many activists like him. Near the end of the piece, he quotes from a piece that he wrote during that period:…