The Akron-AAUP has announced that a strike authorization vote will take place March 7-11. AKRON, Ohio – March 3, 2016 – The American Association of University Professors, University of Akron Chapter (Akron-AAUP) has announced to faculty that a strike authorization vote of the union membership will take place from March 7 – March 11, 2016. This announcement comes after…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday word came that Simon Newman, the notorious president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, had resigned. Newman, readers will recall, was the fool who spoke of drowning at-risk freshmen like “bunnies” and who summarily dismissed (and subsequently reinstated) two long-time faculty members for “disloyalty.” (For background go here, here, and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past several months this blog has posted a number of items about the growing and dangerous trend of conducting searches for top administrators in secret, with no public disclosure of candidates. The disastrous consequences of such searches have already been witnessed at the Universities of Missouri and Iowa and have…
BY HANK REICHMAN This Friday, March 4, Alice Dreger is scheduled to speak on academic freedom at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE). Dreger is the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, an engaging, personal,…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Paul Fain had an interesting story in Inside Higher Education this month. Mr. Fain looked at transfer success rates for students who participated in the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society and the Dell Scholars program to determine some of the factors contributing to higher graduation and transfer rates for participants in…
The following essay by University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Christopher Newfield appeared originally on the Remaking the University blog and is republished with permission. Although the three institutions discussed are from the San Francisco Bay Area, the issues addressed are ones we faculty members are confronting everywhere. The New Normal Isn’t Normal–It…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ Today, the AAUP filed an amicus brief with the National Labor Relations Board in the Columbia University case, arguing that graduate assistants at private sector institutions should be considered employees with collective bargaining rights. The brief responded to an invitation from the NLRB to file amicus briefs addressing whether the Board should…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Alarmed by heartbreaking requests from their teaching colleagues for food, health-care, beds, housing, help with shut-off notices from Xcel Energy, etc., the faculty majority in the state’s most financially secure system of colleges asked Colorado’s State Board of Community Colleges and Occupational Education (SBCCOE) today to rethink its priorities. Risking the retaliation…
BY KELLY HAND Academe Blog, an extension of the AAUP’s Academe magazine, was launched in 2011 and now has over 10,000 subscribers. With a prolific group of regular and guest bloggers, the blog has grown each year in popularity, attracting over a half million views in 2015 and over 185,000 views just two months into…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted a piece about the decision by Williams College President Adam Falk to cancel a speech by John Derbyshire, a controversial conservative. Then yesterday William Covino, President of California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), announced that he would cancel a talk by Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of the notorious Breitbart…