BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MILWAUKEE AAUP As faculty, staff, and students prepare to return to a newly re-opened campus this fall, UWM AAUP reminds us of the centrality of academic freedom and democratic governance in ensuring our collective safety and public health. The Covid-19 pandemic is not over. Faculty, staff, and students must be free…
BY THE AAUP RESEARCH DEPARTMENT This is the second in a series of three blog posts on findings from the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. You can read the first post here. The steady rise of contingent faculty appointments and the growth of administration in higher education present a significant…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY In the middle of the summer and in the middle of a pandemic, with an overwhelming majority of faculty and other community stakeholders voicing their objections to the plan and with few students weighing in on it, the Board of Governors of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) voted on…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of an op-ed piece published July 20, 2021 in the San Francisco Chronicle. From the nationwide spate of legislation targeting “critical race theory” to the recent controversy at Cal State East Bay, where crude and unscholarly claims about the “intelligence” of racial groups were included in an…
BY THE AAUP RESEARCH DEPARTMENT This is the first in a series of three blog posts on findings from the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. New data from an AAUP survey detail the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty salaries and fringe benefits for both tenure-line and non-tenure-track…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS We in the Colorado Conference asked ourselves a few questions as the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine began to lift. Could we create a midsummer event requiring just a few hundred miles of driving that would bring together AAUP members from half a dozen cities? Could we link up, via satellite, to the AAUP…
BY MATT COHEN NB: I write this post as an individual, but our AAUP chapter has issued a statement about the resolution proposed to the University of Nebraska Board of Regents regarding Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory, the latest elixir of Rightist fear and rage, has become a political chip in the Republican primary…
BY A LECTURER IN THE SOUTHEAST As my students and I worked on a collaborative document projected overhead, my inbox appeared on the screen. Whoops. Front and center, there was an email from Parking Services: PARKING TICKET NOTIFICATION Startled, I shut down the projection. As I glanced over my shoulder, I witnessed eye rolls and…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY A decade ago a red flag about post-tenure review was waved in Texas. It was then that the University of Texas system put “more teeth” in its post-tenure review policy and Inside Higher Ed mused that “the step by UT—one of the largest public universities in the nation, with 5,268 tenured faculty…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The far right has made critical race theory (CRT) one of the most polarizing issues in a deeply polarized country. And this is precisely what the architect of the anti-CRT media campaign Christopher Rufo intended. In March, he tweeted: We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and…