BY HANK REICHMAN This week, within a span of 24 hours, I read two newly published articles that so coincided with my recent thinking and writing (and, at least implicitly, with each other) that I immediately felt a bit jealous that I hadn’t written them. Of course, there’s plenty of space for multiple voices arguing…
BY AMIT BAISHYA AND JULIE ANN WARD “OU Days of Action” was organized on September 20 and 21 to coincide with the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents Meeting. This action was the culmination of a months-long process of appealing to OU’s upper administration to adopt basic, common-sense policies of COVID-19 mitigation, with little to…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the wake of a week of statewide campus protest against poor COVID-19 practices at Georgia’s state universities and colleges, more than 50 faculty members at the University of Georgia, full and associate professors in the life sciences, have announced that they will require masks in their classrooms, in violation of the…
BY EVA CHERNIAVSKY 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 humanities and social sciences), and the faculty continues to…
BY RACHEL IDA BUFF AND S. ANI MUKHERJI We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 12 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. As coeditors, we agreed on the theme for the volume, “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity,” late last summer—a time of cascading loss and despair, but also of inspiring…
BY JONATHAN FEINGOLD Earlier this month, President Biden delivered the COVID-19 speech we needed. As the Delta variant surges, Biden offered concrete policy and commanding leadership. He announced wide-ranging initiatives to maximize vaccinations, curb transmission, and protect our kids. He was also unifying but blunt, calling out “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY It’s been a long week here in Georgia. I write at the end of weeklong, statewide protests about our university system’s poor COVID-19 policies. You might have seen media coverage splashed across many platforms and networks. It’s also been a long month here as our hospitals are overrun and our campuses saw…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM Melvyn Goldfinger, who was associate professor of neuroscience, cell biology, and physiology at Wright State University, died on September 17 at the age of seventy-four. Mel Goldfinger was a champion for academic freedom, shared governance, and the economic security of the faculty–the three bedrock principles of the AAUP. It was Mel, along…
BY AUDREY TRUSCHKE The following are remarks made at a virtual congressional briefing on “Hindu Supremacists attacks on Academic Freedom,” sponsored by a coalition of eighteen organizations in the United States on September 8, 2021. The remarks have been lightly edited for style and updated with a postscript on a recent academic conference. Hindu nationalism…
BY CATHERINE M. YOUNG Follow the foibles of Claire Park, a Walt Whitman expert and part-time instructor at a small liberal arts college and large public university as she looks ahead to the fall semester and wonders how she will pay her November and December rent if her third class is canceled because not enough…