Ohio Conference President Provides Senate Testimony on the Decline in State Support, Administrate Bloat, the Cost of Intercollegiate Athletics, and Faculty Workload

Testimony of John T. McNay, Ph.D., President Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, Before the Ohio Senate Finance Committee, Senator Scott Oelslager, Chair, March 3, 2015   Chairman Oelslager, Ranking Member Skindell, and distinguished members of the Finance Committee: my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio Conference…

Cornel West Cancels Thulin Lecture in Protest of Salaita Firing

The Center for Constitutional Rights is reporting that Cornel West is boycotting, in solidarity protest, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the firing of tenured Associate Professor Steven Salaita for extramural utterances on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last year: Dr. Cornel West Joins Boycott of Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over Salaita Firing March 4, 2015, New York – Esteemed…

Proposed Closure of South Carolina State University

The AAUP today sent a letter to South Carolina legislators urging them to reject a panel’s proposal to close South Carolina State University (SCSU), which was founded in 1896, and is the state’s only publicly funded historically Black university. The letter notes that historically black institutions (HBIs) like SCSU came into being as a result…

Truth and Media

On June 24, 1968 (I know the date thanks to Wikipedia), I walked from the Capitol in Washington, DC to the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) headquarters at 14th and U with a bunch of SCLC activists. Only three of us on the small march were white and I was just a sixteen-year-old kid. By…

Why Transfer Agreements Don’t Work in Higher Education

There is something to be said for how the selection process works in American higher education. Within a decentralized system offering both public and private opportunities, there are various levels of selectivity, sticker prices, and public subsidies both to students and institutions – in principle, something for everyone. Some opportunities start with bold ideas, like…

A Political Attack on a North Carolina Center

The Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school has been eliminated by the Board of Governors. As the AAUP noted in a statement opposing this move, “centers must be free to sponsor curricular and extracurricular programs and provide services to the public across the broadest…

In Delaware, Dramatically Different Conceptions of the Current State and the Future Prospects of Higher Education

Earlier this month, Dr. Patrick T. Harker, President of the University of Delaware, wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer expressing his views of the American university and the faculty of the University of Delaware. His op-ed is available at: http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20150205_Universities_must_adapt_to_meet_student_needs.html After an open meeting of the membership of the University of Delaware chapter of AAUP,…