BY HANK KALET There has been a strike wave across academia that is altering the landscape for those of us who teach and work in higher education—and Rutgers is poised to join the party. Strikes at The New School, the University of California system, the University of Illinois Chicago, and threats by faculty, adjuncts, and…
BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER Once upon a time, the administration of a sleepy state university proposed a new budget, offering the rationale that the new budget would “incentivize” departments and promote “entrepreneurial” conduct—couching it in terms of “decentralized” operations and rewarding colleges for increases in their student full-time equivalent enrollments. Three years into the proposed experiment…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…
BY ALEX ZUKAS In the latest act in a continuing coup against the faculty at National University that started in spring 2020, the interim president and board of trustees just imposed a faculty handbook that defines academic freedom and shared governance in ways that are unrecognizable to AAUP members as it completely hollows out those…
BY THOMAS J. PFAFF There is no shortage of articles addressing challenges and issues with shared governance on campuses. COVID-19 has accelerated the situation, as noted in an AAUP report that states, “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the most serious challenges to academic governance in the last fifty years.” The Chronicle also reports on this in…
BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU In the past several years, Linfield University in Oregon has gained a reputation for creating a hostile work environment. One reason is that it has displayed a willingness to harass and even fire tenured faculty who are willing to point out its failures in key areas like sexual harassment, faculty governance, and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following are excerpts from a special report, The State of America’s Libraries, released today by the American Library Association. Librarians have always been on the front lines in the fight to protect the freedom to read. But in 2021, libraries found themselves at the center of attacks orchestrated by conservative…
BY JENNIFER RUTH AND ELLEN SCHRECKER We’re used to hearing that American higher education is in serious danger. Many of us have developed a kind of learned helplessness in response to the regularity with which we hear about the crises of the academy. But we are not powerless. Although the current educational gag orders targeting…
POSTED BY SARAH MINK The winter issue of Academe explores how the pandemic has changed faculty organizing and engendered new kinds of solidarity. The articles offer snapshots of the recent work of AAUP chapters around the country, provide templates for expanding the faculty’s influence on campus, and draw out lessons that chapters can carry forward into…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Perhaps fittingly for our time, it is marked by the revelation that on January 10, by a 10-0 vote, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board removed from the middle school curriculum Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, which tells the…