papers on a desk include images of a colorful bar chart and graph line plotting data points in red and blue

Good and Bad News in Latest AAUP Report on Shared Governance

BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE On October 14, the AAUP released its third report on data collected from this year’s Shared Governance Survey as part of a special issue of Academe dedicated to governance. This report focuses on responses to questions about the composition of senates and similar faculty governance bodies and the conduct of presidential searches, as well as findings…

What Can We Do About McCarthyism 2.0?

BY JENNIFER RUTH We at Academe blog have a number of posts discussing the legislation attempting to restrict curricula teaching race and gender justice and critical race theory. See here, here, here, and here.  “This is the new McCarthyism,”  historian Ellen Schrecker has written. The AAUP itself has put out a number of statements criticizing…

Academe cover

New Academe Surveys the State of Academic Governance

BY THE AAUP Fall 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 4 The fall 2021 issue of Academe surveys the present state of academic governance. It includes a new report on findings of the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, firsthand accounts of governance struggles on campuses around the country, and a pair of articles that confront the threat posed…

Harkness Tower at Yale

A University or a Billionaires’ Toy

BY JASON STANLEY Yale University is a central democratic institution, a fact recognized by its tax-exempt status. It provides a forum in which society’s most difficult issues can be confronted and freely discussed. The University educator is thus tasked with presenting their students with intellectually rigorous foundational challenges to tradition; that is the role of…

Understanding Academic Freedom

BY HANK REICHMAN If I may be excused a moment of self-promotion, today marks the official publication date of my new book, Understanding Academic Freedom.  My purpose in writing Understanding was to provide a concise (the book is just 205 pages minus notes and index) and accessible introduction to the concept of academic freedom as…

The Black Scare

BY ERIC SMAW Recently, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 233, which requires the state Board of Education and Board of Governors to conduct an annual survey of students and professors at public colleges and universities to determine if they feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints in the classroom. State Rep. Spencer Roach, who sponsored…