Today I’m pleased to be able to publish this guest post by AAUP member Miranda Merklein, a contract professor serving the Northern New Mexico area. She holds a Ph.D. in English from University of Southern Mississippi, an M.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s college, and a B.A. in political science from College of Santa…
Nate Silver’s unfavorable projections seem to have spiked progressive interest in the November elections, in which control of the House and the Senate, as well as control of a number of state governments, will be at issue. A fairly large number of House members and senators have decided not to seek re-election and to retire…
What follows is a letter sent by a University of Southern Maine alumna to Theo Kalikow, the university president, in response to his announcement that full-time faculty positions need to be eliminated in response to a projected deficit in the institution’s budget. It is, in some respects, a follow-up to a previous post that I…
Northwestern University has already indicated that it plans to appeal this decision, and it may very well be overturned on appeal. But the arguments presented by the NLRB regional director who has communicated the decision are very thought-provoking. I have removed the footnotes because I think that the decision is more than long enough without…
In a big victory for labor rights (and student rights), the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Northwestern athletes are eligible to form a union and called for a secret ballot election. Northwestern University spokesperson Alan K. Cubbage said the university would appeal the decision and declared: “Northwestern believes strongly that our student-athletes are…
My ready illustration of talking heads with very little to say has long been the reporting in the immediate aftermath of the Challenger disaster. The nightly news anchors were on the air throughout most of that afternoon and evening, and each of them was provided with a rather large plastic model of the space shuttle,…
Guest Blogger Douglas Boyd is a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. The 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” (adopted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) (http://www.aaup.org/report/), the Association of Governing Boards of Universities (AGBU), the American Council…
In preparing to be a guest lecturer in an Introduction to Bioethics class, I have been reviewing information on the Human Genome Project (HGP), the project that many have called medicine and biology’s first example of “Big Science”. Todd Taylor, a noted bioinformatician at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan, when reminiscing about the…
An article published yesterday by Portside in Portland, Maine, opens: “Faculty and students launched an occupation of a Maine university building Friday to demand a halt to mass faculty layoffs and department slashes that they say are part of the austerity cuts devastating public education nation-wide. “Over 100 people launched a late-morning occupation of the…
In some respects, but especially in terms of its higher-ed dimensions, the Russian invasion of Crimea seems to echo the American invasion of Grenada. Those readers who were old enough to be following the news in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, will remember the U.S. invasion of that small Caribbean island with a…