two rows of wooden alphabet blocks with painted letters spelling out "Hand" on the top row and "Book" on the bottom row, with a reflection on the surface below

Faculty Handbooks Are Not Meant to Be Ironic Documents

BY ALEX ZUKAS In a recent Academe Blog post, Eva Cherniavsky wrote, “As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the…

a worn brown leather ankle boot without laces on a wooden floor

Colorado Community College Revenues Rise While Instructors Remain in Poverty

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Note: The Colorado Conference published this press release yesterday. It is another example of how activists can be their own journalists. Research your organization and the larger context for the decision-making destroying the profession. Crunch the numbers and provide memorable images of what those numbers mean. Set the record straight with facts…

Charles G. Sellers, 1923-2021

BY HANK REICHMAN Charles G. Sellers, an historian of the early 19th-century U.S. and longtime member of the University of California at Berkeley Department of History died last week at the age of 98.  As a scholar Sellers was best known for his book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, published in 1991, which, according…

Weeping in the Promised Land

BY HANK REICHMAN Over the years that I’ve been writing for this blog I’ve occasionally posted links to music videos that have some resonance for the concerns of our readers (I’m especially proud of my two Trump playlists, here and here–a few of the links have expired, however).  The other night my wife and I…

I Wish I Had Written That

BY HANK REICHMAN This week, within a span of 24 hours, I read two newly published articles that so coincided with my recent thinking and writing (and, at least implicitly, with each other) that I immediately felt a bit jealous that I hadn’t written them.  Of course, there’s plenty of space for multiple voices arguing…

scene of an outdoor protest about COVID-19 safety on the campus of the University of Oklahoma

There Will Still Be Singing in These Dark Times

BY AMIT BAISHYA AND JULIE ANN WARD “OU Days of Action” was organized on September 20 and 21 to coincide with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents Meeting. This action was the culmination of a months-long process of appealing to OU’s upper administration to adopt basic, common-sense policies of COVID-19 mitigation, with little to…

Coronavirus

This Could Be Big!

BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of a week of statewide campus protest against poor COVID-19 practices at Georgia’s state universities and colleges, more than 50 faculty members at the University of Georgia, full and associate professors in the life sciences, have announced that they will require masks in their classrooms, in violation of the…