BY MARY ELLEN FLANNERY The following is reposted with permission from NEA Today. Mary Ellen Flannery is senior writer at the National Education Association. Fifty years ago, a Florida state legislative committee sought to identify, interrogate, and purge gay schoolteachers and university faculty. With subpoena powers and a network of informants, state legislators used uniformed…
BY NICOLE BRAUN A few weeks ago, adjuncts at one of the colleges I work for—Any College, USA[1] —were taking back our power through the use of the tool “reply all” to protest an adjunct issue. If you had a chance to read Part One, you would know that the Reply All action emerged from…
BY HANNAH JOHNSTON, M. SIX SILBERMAN, AND JAMIE WOODCOCK Dana Barr put the kids to bed, opened the computer, and logged in to Amazon Mechanical Turk to look for work. After about a minute, Dana saw a task from Albaventura University Cogsci. “Ten minute survey about political beliefs, $1.00.” Six dollars an hour—not the best…
BY MARY ELLEN JUNDA, JEFFREY OGBAR, AND MICHAEL BAILEY Mandatory Vaccination Policy The global COVID-19 pandemic has affected all facets of our world in a range of ways. Higher education was forced to fundamentally shift over the last year and a half, making many campuses empty of students, staff and faculty, while we pivoted to…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Fall classes started for me on Monday. Since then I have done several media interviews about the first days amid our scary COVID-19 surge here in Georgia. The reporters have asked me about the COVID-deafness of our state and university system leaders. Faculty and local administrators have pleaded with those in charge…
BY AMIT BAISHYA, MICHAEL GIVEL, AND JULIE ANN WARD Last week, the University of Oklahoma (OU) AAUP chapter wrote an Open Letter to University Decision-Makers, published on our website and promoted on social media with over four hundred signatures from faculty, staff, students, and community members, to address OU decision-makers’ inadequate and deeply disappointing response…
BY JENNIFER RUTH As Carolyn Betensky’s posts made clear (see here, here and here), universities and colleges are not prepared to safely protect faculty and students as classes begin this fall. Individual crises are erupting everywhere (as this Inside Higher Ed article about more professors quitting over face-to-face teaching mandates details) and some organized actions…
BY AARON ROUSSELL The article below appeared in the most recent Member News of PSU-AAUP (Portland State’s AAUP chapter for faculty and academic professionals). Drawing shamelessly on Anna Kornbluh’s adaptation of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, it alerts our members to the weaponization of the covid-19 crisis. We are fortunate to be unionized and able…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Could we have a winner in the administrative malfeasance contest, COVID-19 division? I think we may! Of course, it’s too early to say. The entries keep rolling in. But this one is a contender. National University is requiring faculty to attend graduation at the San Diego Padres’ Petco Park in downtown San…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY On Friday, I posted the first part of this survey of what faculty face this fall at institutions in COVID-denialist states. Part I discussed conditions in Louisiana and Georgia. Here, I report what I heard from colleagues in Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas. * * * At the University of Florida, where no…