The Location of the AAUP's Founding

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…

Please Stand with the Educators and Academic Professionals at Portland State University!

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…

Ohio’s Public-University Presidents Take a Stand, of Sorts, on Faculty Workload

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…

Letter to USM President from Women Faculty at Merrimack College

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…

“Vodka Sam” Redux: Why Hannah Horvath May End Up Attending the Iowa Writers Workshop but Never Actually Set Foot on the University of Iowa Campus

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…

Bobby Jindal Calls a Large Tuition Increase an Increase in His State’s Support for Higher Education

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%…

2013 Was a Banner Year for the Mole Rat

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…

College Sports and the Student Athlete

Last week  Peter Sung Ohr, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago, ruled that football players at Northwestern University could unionize. In issuing the ruling, Ohr found that the players were employees of the university. The ruling sent shock waves reverberating through American higher education since no one expected this outcome.…

Small Liberal Arts Colleges and the STEM Pipeline

Last week, The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) released a report on the contribution of small and mid-sized private, non-profit colleges to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) pipeline. The report is a component of a more encompassing public information campaign, Securing America’s Future: The Power of Liberal Arts Education. The report addressed four…