POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter signed by 114 members of the faculty at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs in response to a campaign appearance at the university by Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. July 28, 2016 Dear Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak, With the pending visit of the Republican nominee…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I have not been able to find the original YELP-produced results, but the results have been reported by Ana Swanson in an article for the Washington Post [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/the-strange-and-wonderful-things-people-search-for-during-the-republican-and-democratic-conventions/] and by Brittany Kriegstein in an article for Business Insider [http://www.businessinsider.com/difference-between-rnc-and-dnc-on-yelp-2016-7?utm].
BY MICHAEL DECESARE The May-June issue of Academe included Maria Maisto’s and Seth Kahn’s review of Michael Bérubé’s and Jennifer Ruth’s 2015 book The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments. What follows is a rejoinder from Bérubé and Ruth. A response from Maisto and Kahn will be published on this blog shortly. We are…
BY MARTIN KICH Today, Donald Trump spoke in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and promised to restore the jobs of coal miners. I grew up in Scranton, and he might just as well have promised to restore the jobs of telegraph operators or those in typewriter factories. The population of Scranton peaked at more than 140,000 in 1930.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On the Costs of Intercollegiate Athletics This is an excerpt of an e-mail sent to the CFO of our university by Rudy Fichtenbaum, who, in addition to serving as the President of the national AAUP, is employed an adviser to the Executive committee of our AAUP chapter at Wright State: “When…
BY JEFF BAKER The word overload can have more than one meaning to higher education faculty. It can mean increasing class size or adding additional course sections to the faculty member’s required minimum teaching load. While many full-time faculty welcome overloads as an opportunity to increase income, they are usually a bad deal. Adjunct…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL American higher education’s operational model is based on outmoded — and some (myself included) would argue, unsustainable — revenue and expense assumptions. The premise is that student-generated revenues will expand to offset increasing operational expenses of the institutions. However, the decline in per-student net tuition revenues and the backlash against higher…
BY GILLIAN STEINBERG The ongoing reduction of tenure-track positions at colleges and universities has been news for decades, and advocates for increased tenured positions usually point to rising numbers of administrators and unchecked administrator salaries as the root cause of this reduction and the site for change. I agree wholeheartedly that administrators are overpaid and…
POSTED BY HENRY REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent today (July 25) to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and signed by nearly 400 U.S. academics, including AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP First Vice-President Henry Reichman, AAUP-CBC Chair Howard Bunsis, AAUP General Counsel…
BY AARON BARLOW Over the past few years, I’ve become less and less enthusiastic about grants as a funding mechanism for higher-education-related projects. It’s not just the Koch brothers and their use of grants to promote particular ideologies but even the gentler tugs by funders such as the NEH toward consideration of particular arenas or inclusion…