In March I reposted from the WMU-AAUP blog comments delivered to the Western Michigan University (WMU) Board of Trustees by WMU-AAUP President and AAUP national Council member Lisa Minnick. Below are comments delivered today, June 29, to the same board by Professor Minnick. They offer a truly eloquent and effective defense of fundamental academic values…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by Peter Schmidt entitled “AAUP Rethinks How It Fights Governing Boards.” In a nutshell, the piece argues that as college and university governing boards, often overseeing multiple state institutions, increasingly overreach and interfere in governance matters best left to faculty and administrators, the…
Writing for CapCon: Michigan Capital Confidential, Tom Gantert reports that Bay de Noc College on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has announced that it will be initiating an athletics program despite—or, rather, because of—a budget deficit that has not been resolved despite layoffs of two faculty and nine staff. The college “will add men’s and women’s…
In the initial item in this series, I mentioned that my statement to the Wright State Board of Trustees was preceded by two open letters to the bargaining unit faculty represented by our AAUP chapter at Wright State, letters which were then also posted to the faculty and staff listserves and to our social media…
Donald Trump gave his most recent economic speech with this backdrop. I briefly thought that he might somehow be striking the same theme as my recent post “Waste, Job Creation, and Higher Ed,” but the choice of backdrop appears to have been just another example of a campaign that has not given much thought to…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Governance is sometimes a messy business. On the national political level, for example, the intersection of ideology, political posturing, and the demands and inflexibility of competing interests within the two political parties and between the branches of government has led to the deep dysfunction that angers voters. College Campuses are Generally…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN “Yes Virginia, there is a constitution”: an AAUP constitution. While inexplicably not included in the “centennial” edition of the Redbook, (American Association of University Professors Policy Documents and Reports, 2015, Eleventh Edition) there is indeed an AAUP constitution. It does appear along with an excellent preambular historical statement on pp. 283-90 in the tenth edition…
With contract talks stalled, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, which represents more than 6,000 faculty members at Pennsylvania’s 14 state universities, has scheduled an emergency legislative assembly in August to determine whether a strike authorization vote will be taken by its members. The faculty have been working without a new…
BY MARTIN KICH This rumination is the latest from Louis Gohmert, widely known by the epithet “The Dumbest Man in Congress”: “I really wonder how many people in this body who had the ultimate power to decide whether humanity would go forward or not, whether there was an asteroid coming or something that would end…
That universities have both followed the script of neoliberalism and helped write that script is no news to academic workers, to readers of Radical Teacher in particular. The corporatizing of higher education has ripped apart many conventions and structures of the postwar university: the professional self-organization of those who teach; their relative independence from administrative control; job…