On the recent list of the Top 200 Universities in the World, the US is the dominant nation, with 49 institutions on the list, ahead of the UK with 30 institutions, the Netherlands with twelve, Germany with 11, Canada, Australia, and Japan with 8 each, China with 7, and France, Sweden and Hong Kong with…
Joint Statement of the UW-Milwaukee AAUP, UW-Whitewater AAUP, and UW-Madison AAUP executive committees to the UW System Tenure Policy Task Force. Milwaukee, Whitewater, and Madison, 17 September 2015 The University of Wisconsin has a one hundred year-long tradition of upholding the principles of academic freedom and shared governance as set forth by the American Association…
This guest post is by Michael J. Clark, Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University. The recent fundraising contretemps at Portland State University has embarrassed the institution, along with its many committed administrators, donors, faculty, and staff. While the failures in the oversight process by university fundraising executives have been chronicled by…
A bit more than a year ago a California Superior Court, ruling in Vergara v. California, overturned California statutes guaranteeing due process protections for K-12 teachers with more than two years experience (so-called “teacher tenure”) and layoff by seniority. At the time I posted several items on the case, first here, then here, here, and…
In their September-October 2015 Academe article, “Increasing Access and Making Practice More Inclusive through Disability Awareness Training,” Carrie E. Rood and Michelle L. Damiani share their experience with creating a training module for new graduate teaching assistants at Syracuse University. They designed the module, called “Disability Awareness and Culture,” in order to educate teaching assistants…
When I read the headline, “This French Philosopher Is The Only One Who Can Explain The Donald Trump Phenomenon” and then realized that the “French philosopher” was Roland Barthes, I exclaimed, Wow!?! Or maybe it was, Wo!?! And this item did not even appear in some sort of academic newsletter or other publication focused on…
Back to School in Higher Ed: Who Needs Faculty? Although 50 years of research has shown that faculty/student interaction is crucial to student success, recent trends and newly-adopted practices in higher education actually decrease the possibilities for faculty to interact with students in the amounts and the ways that matter most. This paper examines the price…
This is a guest post by David Schultz, a contributor to the September-October issue of Academe and professor of political science at Hamline University. He was formerly AAUP chapter president at Trinity University in Texas and Minnesota state chair for AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Higher education’s business plan, as I argue in “The Rise and Coming Demise of the…
These are the QS World University Rankings of the Top 200 Universities for 2015. For an explanation of the methodology used to produce these rankings and for other rankings provided by QS World University Rankings, go to the website at: http://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings.
This is a re-post from Ana Fores-Tamayo’s blog Adjunct Justice [http://adjunct-justice.blogspot.com/]. Given that the issue of undocumented immigrants in the United States has moved to the forefront during this year’s still nascent presidential campaign, and given that much of the discussion of immigration has been quite generalized and abstract, this sort of personalized perspective on…