Think Outside the Box and Publish an Index

By Caprice Lawless, VP for Community Colleges, Colorado Conference, AAUP Adjunct faculty, especially, are pressed for the time to research their institution, to learn how the moving parts work (or don’t), and where the money is going. Do it for them. Publish an index. Take a look at ours (link below) to give you some…

CFA and PSC Fighting for Faculty

Two AAUP/AAUP-CBC affiliates — the California Faculty Association (CFA), which represents over 23,000 faculty members in the 23-campus California State University (CSU), and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents more than 25,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Research Foundation — are engaged in protracted contract…

Professionalism and Unionism: Academic Freedom, Collective Bargaining, and the American Association of University Professors

Not too long ago I was on a panel about academic freedom at the University of California, Davis, with Robert Post, Dean of Yale Law School, former AAUP General Counsel and Committee A Chair, and co-author (with Matthew Finkin) of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom.  At a dinner afterwards with campus…

U.S. Higher Education News for September 27, 2015

DiPaola, Jerry. “Stipend to Offset College Athletes’ Costs Could Unbalance Playing Field.” Pittsburgh Tribune Review [PA] 27 Sep. 2015. For decades, the scholarship model in college athletics remained unchanged: room and board, tuition and books, miscellaneous fees. . . . This year, those items will be supplemented for the first time at 65 of the…

What Happens when Expatriated Workers Return Home?

Over the past few decades, multicultural studies, diaspora studies, and cross-cultural and transnational studies have all provoked considerable scholarly interest and have become distinct disciplines, reflecting the dramatic increase in the mobility of the global population. In the midst of these broader movements of people, corporations have placed considerable value on international studies, foreign-language studies,…

Neologisms That Sound Ridiculous Usually Are Ridiculous—and Telltale Indicators of the Corporatization of the Professions

It is, of course, one of the great linguistic ironies that education in general and higher education in particular are among the most jargon-ridden of the disciplines. Indeed, it may be that our penchant for almost endlessly creating and re-creating jargon has made us especially susceptible to the jargon invented by the “educational reformers,” the…

Outrageous moves to foster runaway salaries for administrators

Michael Behrent, the president of the Appalachian State University chapter of the AAUP, and John Steen, Program Coordinator of Scholars for North Carolina’s Future (with contribution from Jim Carmichael, professor at UNC Greensboro and president of the AAUP’s North Carolina Conference) have an op-ed today in The News & Observer or Raleigh, NC entitled “Outrageous move to foster runaway…