BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a petition posted to Change-org by Seth Alterman, asking for public support for a petition protesting the elimination of the campus police force at Dean College, which is located outside of Boston. The officers had just chosen to unionize when the college suddenly announced that it was outsourcing campus…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN The adjunct struggle for union rights and human rights is spreading. The National Labour Relations Board (N.L.R.B.) has authorised Loyola University Chicago adjuncts and non-tenure track full-time faculty to conduct an election. Adjuncts at the University of Chicago are organising. The Chicago City Council in October voted unanimously to endorse the…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Inside Higher Education just released the 2016 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers, conducted by Gallup and answered by 539 chief academic officers and provosts. In several categories, the results are telling. In a nutshell, almost all respondents stressed the continuing importance of the liberal arts. Interestingly, most recognized…
BY HENRY REICHMAN During his 50+ years on the AAUP staff Jordan E. Kurland, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, must have helped thousands of faculty members resist challenges to their academic freedom. Yet because he never sought the spotlight for himself, Jordan and his remarkable work remained largely unknown to most…
BY AARON BARLOW The reasoning behind the choice of “Media and the Faculty” as the theme of the current issue of Academe can be gleaned from David Daley’s interview on Salon with Jane Mayer about her new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Concerning Lewis Powell who, before being…
This unsigned opinion piece was published through the Institute for America’s Future of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/], which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s…
In a post to Quartz India, Vivekananda Nemana has reported on the suicide by hanging of Rohith Chakravarthi Vemula, a doctoral student at the University of Hyderabad, which is also known as the Hyderabad Central University. Namana reports: “College students are up in arms across major Indian cities. Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune have witnessed…
There has been a great deal of interest in the Open Syllabus Project, including an article in The New York Times. I thought I’d take a look at it and see what tentative conclusions I could draw (a la Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading) about what is being taught in my field of English in the United States.…
When I cornered Richard Leakey to ask him about the elephant that had once chased me but had let me go, he responded, “The elephant wasn’t interested in you.” Though clearly anxious to get away after his talk at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, he had heard out my tale of how it…