BY CHERYL NEALE-MCFALL Through our research and personal experiences, we know that the struggle is real for mothers in academia, especially during this pandemic. My experience is consistent with the challenges described in “COVID-19, Academic Mothers, and Opportunities for the Academy,” an article I coauthored with Mary A. Hermann for the fall issue of Academe.…
BY CHRIS ARNEY In 2020, The United States Military Academy at West Point terminated the employment of an assistant professor whose specialty is American women’s writing. In addition to her teaching, this professor helped lead the academy’s program to support talented cadets applying for graduate scholarships such as the Rhodes, Truman, and Marshall scholarships. Under…
BY CATHRYN BAILEY I once had a faculty colleague who could be as blunt as a barbell, as direct as a laser beam, and as unblinking as an ancient tortoise. A middle-aged woman of color, she eschewed the feminine niceties required to earn her likability badge in the raced and gendered game of social and…
BY THE NYU-AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 10/23/2020 Today, Zoom unilaterally shut down a webinar hosted by the NYU chapter of the AAUP, and co-sponsored by several NYU departments and institutes. The webinar was scheduled to discuss the censorship, by Zoom and other big tech platforms, of an open classroom session last month at SFSU, featuring the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON On October 17, about 300 Northwestern University students and supporters held a protest in Evanston as part of their ongoing efforts to abolish the campus police department and enact other reforms. During the protest, a campus banner was burned, various buildings and even murals in town were tagged with messages including…
BY GRAHAM A. PECK Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020. A video of the address is available here. In 2017, I…
POSTED BY THE AAUP Fall 2020 | Vol. 106, No. 4 The fall issue of Academe takes stock of the crisis that has transformed our lives and the way we work. It features a series of reflections on faculty life during the pandemic as well as articles that look ahead to the near- and long-term challenges…
BY PATTY O’NEILL The op-ed below was originally published in the CT Mirror, and we are posting it here with the permission of the author. Our communities have been shaken to their core. COVID-19 has taken loved ones, jobs have vanished, and racial injustice continues unabated. But we have also witnessed the everyday heroism of ordinary people.…
BY DREW MCKEVITT Last week historian Lora Burnett at Collin College in Texas was the latest target of online harassment fomented by the website Campus Reform, only to be thrown under the bus by her administration in violation of its own academic freedom policies. Guest blogger Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today (October 19) by the board of the University of California (UC) Berkeley Faculty Association. The University We Are For State support for public higher education in California has declined for decades: it constituted approximately one-third of the UC budget in 1990 and is about 10…