The Columbus Dispatch recently reported that Kent State University is planning to grant an associates degree to any student who completes 60 credit hours, or about half of the credit hours needed for most baccalaureate degrees. Apparently the university will create a generic associates degree for this purpose. In addition to its main campus in…
Houston’s KHOU reports that at Lonestar College students enrolled in an introduction to chemistry section were taught instead an advanced chemistry course. Apparently the mix-up was not discovered until almost the end of the semester, at which point almost every student in the course had a failing grade. The news report featured an student who…
Several reports of the AAUP’s founding mention that it took place in the Chemists’ Club in New York. While there is a website by the current Chemists’ Club, it moved its location and sold the building in which the founding took place. I was able to locate information about the original location of the Chemists’ Club, which is…
By a 94%-6% margin, the AAUP chapter at Portland State University has voted to strike on April 16 if substantive progress has not been made in their contract negotiations with their administration. They ask that you show your support for that vote by signing this petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/i-stand-with-the-educators-academic-professionals-at-psu They were initially hoping to get at least…
As I have indicated in several previous posts, there is another attempt in this year’s budget review bill (HB 484) in the Ohio legislature to increase faculty workloads by ten percent. I have posted OCAAUP President John McNay’s full testimony on that provision to the House Committee considering the bill. Bruce Johnson has also testified…
The letter below was sent this morning to University of Southern Maine President Theodora Kalikow, protesting the recent action she has taken against faculty. A total of 39 women faculty at Merrimack College–tenured, tenure-track, and contingent–signed their names to this excellent statement. It clearly points out the institutional sexism (and racism) inherent to a “last…
In an earlier post, “’Vodka Sam’ May Be a Symptom of a Problem but She Herself Is Not the Problem, Not Even the Public-Relations Problem” [https://academeblog.org/2013/09/11/vodka-sam-may-be-a-symptom-of-a-problem-but-she-herself-is-not-the-problem-not-even-the-public-relations-problem/], I wrote about the University of Iowa’s being named by Princeton Review as the Top Party School in the United States. Coincidentally, at around that same time, a female…
Peter Kirstein notes on his blog about an important development in a recent case: “Columbia College in Chicago is offering two sections of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict course in their fall 2014 semester offerings. Instructor Iymen Chehade has been in the middle of a major academic freedom case concerning a prior reduction of sections of this…
In its December 2013 report on state support for higher education in the previous fiscal year, the American Association of Colleges and Universities highlighted the singular decline of state support in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, where the 17.6% decline in state funding was very close to double the second highest decline among the states, an 8.9%…
Largely lost among the succession of well-known awards for film, television, and literature was Science magazine’s annual award for Vertebrate of the Year. Pope Francis may have been Time’s consensus pick as Person of the Year for 2013, but the naked mole rat ran away—so to speak–with the Vertebrate of the Year Award. The naked…