BY STEVEN LUBET When Covid-19 protocols forced Texas A&M to withdraw its football team from this year’s Gator Bowl, the game’s sponsors began frantically searching for a replacement to play Wake Forest on December 31, even if that required recruiting a team with a losing record. Under NCAA post-season rules, the first bid went to…
SUBMITTED BY KEVIN L. COPE Supporters of good university governance never stop shaking their heads about Louisiana State University, the only major research university to draw a double censure from the AAUP. This frequently torpedoed flagship institution—the largest vessel in a veritable fleet of state institutions also under AAUP censure—is once again under attack, this…
BY HANK REICHMAN On December 10, I had the pleasure of participating in a fantastic and timely program in the University of California (UC) National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement’s 2021 “Speech Spotlight Live” series. “Is Academic Freedom Under Siege?” featured Sigal Ben-Porath, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and author of…
BY THE CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATION The following is the text of a statement released on December 20 by the California Faculty Association, an AAUP affiliate and collective bargaining agent representing 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches in the California State University (CSU) system. We are pleased to report that we have reached a tentative…
BY IRENE MULVEY Happy busiest time of the semester, colleagues. And for those of you raising children, or who have elderly family members to be concerned about, I don’t know how you do it all at this time of year. I have no idea how I did it myself when my own children were young.…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY An article in today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed covered a significant initiative that is picking up steam on campuses across the country. In response to laws passed or proposed by Republican-dominated state legislatures and boards of trustees that ban the teaching of “divisive” materials on race, racism, and gender at state…
BY MARK JAMES A year ago, I was called in to meet with my dean after a parent complained to the president’s office that I had been discussing white supremacy in my American and African American literature classes. I wrote about that experience last summer in Inside Higher Ed, and I hoped that would be…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
BY MARIAH QUINN The AAUP has launched a podcast called AAUP Presents, which takes a look at issues such as shared governance, academic freedom, and institutional debt. The first three episodes are available now. The series kicks off with an interview with AAUP president Irene Mulvey, who takes us through some of AAUP’s work this…
BY ROBERT A. SCOTT AND CHRISTIAN P. VAUPEL Conflicts between academics and administrators on college campuses have been in the news. Recently, issues of mask mandates, actions taken to reduce expenses due to pandemic-related loss of revenue, and concerns about alleged violations of academic freedom have erupted. What reports about such problems don’t always acknowledge…