POSTED BY MARTY KICH As he has been doing for faculty at institutions across the United States for two decades, past AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum has provided a financial analysis to the AAUP chapter at the University of Akron. He has distilled the main points of that analysis into the following short video: https://akronaaup.org/uas-budget-presentation-dr-rudy-fichtenbaum-responds/. The…
BY HARRY R. LEWIS Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College. This essay is reposted from his blog. I used to visit Hong Kong regularly, and also made a few trips to mainland China. One of those trips put me in a provincial…
POSTED BY MARTY KICH On July 15, the University of Akron Board of Trustees, at the recommendation of President Gary Miller, terminated the employment of ninety-seven full-time faculty members. When factoring in retirements, this results in the loss of over one hundred faculty. The Board and President must rescind this decision or resign their positions.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have written a new study about freedom of the press on campus that has been released today, a product of my 2019–20 fellowship with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The study includes a survey of policies for professional media at the top twenty-five…
POSTED BY SUE RAMLO A couple of months ago, the Provost’s office sent faculty, through their deans, a survey, asking us what we thought the criteria for firings should be. Akron-AAUP saw this for what it was: direct dealing with faculty, and a failed attempt to legitimize the gutting of the faculty. At the time,…
BY KEVIN L. COPE The recent but thankfully short-lived ruling by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which had prohibited international students who take only online courses from remaining in the United States, intensely irritated an academic community already pushed to the emotional brink by budget cuts, the pandemic, and the erosion of respect for…
BY SUE RAMLO My name is Sue Ramlo, and I am on the cut list—or as I like to call it, the Hit List. There are ninety-six of us on the Hit List, over 70 percent of these faculty are tenured faculty members at The University of Akron (UA), as I wrote about in yesterday’s…
BY SUE RAMLO On July 15th, 2020, our worlds turned upside down. Fear filled discussions about a faculty cut list had been circulating for more than a few months. It seemed as if every faculty member assumed that they were on that list of faculty to be laid off. Faculty were brooding, panicking, and anxious,…
BY JOHN McNAY Colleges and universities are being pummeled by the financial impact of the coronavirus. Every day brings more bad news: cuts to state support, large deficits, questionable fall enrollment, and questions as to what degree campuses will be open. Yet, amid the human tragedy, we should see the crisis as an opportunity for…
The following is a press release from the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter. Rutgers AAUP-AFT has filed a lawsuit to force the Rutgers University administration to come clean about the huge sums of money it funnels to an athletics program that continually loses money. The suit, filed last Friday, asks a superior court judge to require the…