POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH As readers of this blog and so likely AAUP members, you may already know about one of the two events. On October 2nd, Chair of the AAUP Racial Justice Committee Glinda Rawls wrote members about the AAPF Call to Action Teach-in on October 14th: National Critical Race Theory Teach In Thursday,…
BY HANK REICHMAN If I may be excused a moment of self-promotion, today marks the official publication date of my new book, Understanding Academic Freedom. My purpose in writing Understanding was to provide a concise (the book is just 205 pages minus notes and index) and accessible introduction to the concept of academic freedom as…
BY JOHN HIGGINS A central aim of the newly published monograph Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance: Within the academic profession at Makerere University is to seek to get hold of an animating contradiction at work in global higher education policy by looking at the impact of global higher education policies on the academic profession as it…
BY ERIC SMAW Recently, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 233, which requires the state Board of Education and Board of Governors to conduct an annual survey of students and professors at public colleges and universities to determine if they feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints in the classroom. State Rep. Spencer Roach, who sponsored…
BY STEVE O’KANE Politics and morality are strange bedfellows. The famous sentence from Anna Karenina comes to mind: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sometimes the night passes in restful harmony, the temperature is just right, the pillows are soft, the lights are out, and not a…
BY ALEX ZUKAS In a recent Academe Blog post, Eva Cherniavsky wrote, “As we enter a fourth decade of life in the neoliberal university, where permanent austerity rules everywhere except in the swelling ranks of upper administration; where the pretense of shared governance has all but collapsed; where tenure lines are vanishing (particularly in the…
BY THE COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATIONS (CUCFA) Hundreds of UC Senate Faculty stand in solidarity with our lecturer colleagues, represented by their union, UC-AFT, in their fight for better working conditions, including recognition as professionals with the right to be rehired. We owe it to them, to ourselves, to our students, and…
BY HARVEY J. GRAFF Great debates about critical race theory “rage” at all levels—including school boards, state legislatures, and national politics—we are told. As I have argued in the Columbus Dispatch, Inside Higher Ed, and Washington Monthly, and as others have pointed out, there is in fact no real debate, because there are no real…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Note: The Colorado Conference published this press release yesterday. It is another example of how activists can be their own journalists. Research your organization and the larger context for the decision-making destroying the profession. Crunch the numbers and provide memorable images of what those numbers mean. Set the record straight with facts…
BY HANK REICHMAN Charles G. Sellers, an historian of the early 19th-century U.S. and longtime member of the University of California at Berkeley Department of History died last week at the age of 98. As a scholar Sellers was best known for his book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, published in 1991, which, according…