BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Scott Jaschik recently interpreted the findings from the 2017 Survey of Admission Directors, sponsored by Inside Higher Education and Gallup and drawn from a sample of 453 admission directors. While the full discussion of these findings is too complex for this space, the general conclusions, especially those specific to enrollment patterns,…
BY LARA SCHWARTZ This blog post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on September 27 and appears here with the author’s permission. Lara Schwartz teaches law and government at American University School of Public Affairs On the night of Sept. 26, shortly after historian Ibram Kendi introduced American University’s new Antiracist Research and Policy Center, an as-yet unidentified man hung posters of…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is professor of history at UCLA. He co-authors Remaking the University with Christopher Newfield, professor of english at UC, Santa Barbara. The farce that was MiloFest has now frittered away into failure. Of course, that will not be…
BY EVA VON DASSOW Guest blogger Eva von Dassow is Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and AAUP Chapter Chair at the University of Minnesota. Since when is demanding that public funds be expended to indulge your wishes a conservative idea? The student group calling itself the Berkeley Patriot and the media company of…
BY TIM McGETTIGAN Tim McGettigan is Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University, Pueblo. It has required nearly four years and humongous legal costs, but I can finally say that I have won my First Amendment battle against Colorado State University. Four years ago, the CSU Board of Governors, former CSU Chancellor Michael Martin and…
BY HANK REICHMAN I thought I might write something in response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech this week at Georgetown University, but then I read Dahlia Lithwick’s take, “The Eggshell Attorney General,” and figured I had little to add. Here are her first three paragraphs, but the entire piece is worth reading: Almost every…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN People often use their freedom of speech to disrupt the speech of others, especially on college campuses in recent years. Of course people have a right to protest, provided they are sufficiently quiet, brief, or distant so as not to prevent the speaker from being heard. On August 25, University of Nebraska–Lincoln…
BY DON ERON As someone who has long agitated for tenure-eligibility for all faculty members (after the successful completion of a probationary period), I have heard many counterarguments. Some of these—particularly coming from tenured faculty, who, as a cohort, tend toward opposition—are so obviously spurious, to say nothing of sanctimonious, that they dissipate of their…
BY AARON NISENSON On September 28, the US Supreme Court announced that it will hear a case, called Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which anti-union forces have pushed in an attempt to have fair-share fees ruled unconstitutional for public-sector employees. Currently, unions can charge fair share fees (also called “agency fees”) to non-union members for the cost of…
BY HARRY HELLENBRAND Harry Hellenbrand served for many years as provost and interim president at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) following a distinguished career as a faculty member, academic senator, department chair and dean at CSU campuses. The essay below addresses changes in curriculum imposed on the CSU’s 23 campuses and their faculty by the…