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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a press release for the Colorado ACLU: Adams State University has agreed to rescind a “No Trespass Order” banning Danny Ledonne, a former professor who publicly criticized administration practices, from its Alamosa, CO campus and to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Colorado based…
BY MARTIN KICH The media has become overly fond, I think, of describing this presidential election as a choice between two unappealing candidates. To be clear, I don’t think that the media is incorrect in making this assessment, but I do think that it is incorrect in suggesting that this election stands as a historical…
BY AARON BARLOW When you rely on the numbers, you count out the people. How often have we heard that? How frequently do we remind ourselves that it’s the people—in our case as educators, the students—who matter most, the individuals and not the numbers that reflect the aggregate? Yet our actions continue to be toward…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE The AAUP will hold its shared governance conference and workshops at the Loews Madison Hotel in Washington, DC, September 30 – October 2, 2016. Proposals are being accepted through Friday, July 29, for presentations on topics relating to academic governance. The preliminary program is available here. Please join us as we mark…