BY CAPRICE LAWLESS We in the Colorado Conference asked ourselves a few questions as the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine began to lift. Could we create a midsummer event requiring just a few hundred miles of driving that would bring together AAUP members from half a dozen cities? Could we link up, via satellite, to the AAUP…
BY MATT COHEN NB: I write this post as an individual, but our AAUP chapter has issued a statement about the resolution proposed to the University of Nebraska Board of Regents regarding Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory, the latest elixir of Rightist fear and rage, has become a political chip in the Republican primary…
BY A LECTURER IN THE SOUTHEAST As my students and I worked on a collaborative document projected overhead, my inbox appeared on the screen. Whoops. Front and center, there was an email from Parking Services: PARKING TICKET NOTIFICATION Startled, I shut down the projection. As I glanced over my shoulder, I witnessed eye rolls and…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY A decade ago a red flag about post-tenure review was waved in Texas. It was then that the University of Texas system put “more teeth” in its post-tenure review policy and Inside Higher Ed mused that “the step by UT—one of the largest public universities in the nation, with 5,268 tenured faculty…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The far right has made critical race theory (CRT) one of the most polarizing issues in a deeply polarized country. And this is precisely what the architect of the anti-CRT media campaign Christopher Rufo intended. In March, he tweeted: We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and…
BY TALIA SCHAFFER Several years ago, I witnessed Malcolm Gladwell fearlessly tell a Cambridge audience that nobody should give a cent to Harvard. Whenever I read someone criticizing Gladwell’s tendency to cherry-pick data, I remember that moment. Two of Gladwell’s recent “Revisionist History” podcast episodes (season 6, episodes 2 and 3) do reveal his characteristic…
BY HANK REICHMAN Have you been compelled to sit through a class that made you, well, uncomfortable? Was it painful to learn there was once chattel slavery right here in the good ol’ US of A? Did you suffer heart palpitations upon being told that race had something to do with it? And what about…
BY RAFAEL JAIME As colleges and universities prepare to reopen in the fall, academic workers across the country are making it clear they are not interested in returning to business as usual. The years-long crisis underscored the extent to which our current higher education system has lost sight of its core mission to educate future…
BY ALEX SMALL I recently read Tom Ginsburg’s article “How to Truly Protect Academic Freedom” with sympathetic disagreement. I share his concern over the many high-profile incidents that he cites, and I have lamented many of them with friends. I am an avid consumer (even tester?) of academic freedom, lodging dissents in my university’s academic…
BY HANK REICHMAN The headline on Inside Higher Ed was provocative, if not downright inflammatory: “AAUP vs. FIRE.” But rather than the knockdown drag-out contest between two national organizations celebrated for their defense of intellectual freedom implied by the headline, the article that followed offered something much more modest. The AAUP chapter at the University…