BY MATTHEW BOEDY When it became increasingly obvious to me and my colleagues in Georgia through campus town halls and meetings that our university system would not institute a mask mandate for all during our upcoming fall semester, our AAUP chapter grew concerned. The why of that decision is surely political, since Georgia is a…
BY THE AAUP The AAUP issued the following statement today: As the ongoing demonstrations of the past few weeks have shown, our nation is once again being called on to reckon with systemic racism and its impact on Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other people of color. Black lives matter, and the AAUP stands in solidarity…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following is an open letter sent by the members of the Wittenberg AAUP chapter to their university president. The Ohio Conference AAUP fully supports the chapter and their efforts to promote and enforce standards of shared governance. June 9, 2020 An Open Letter to the President, Provost, Board of…
BY JOHN MCNAY One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get our college and university administrators to put education first and not allow the resources of the institutions to get hijacked for other purposes. The inability to focus on the real problems is widespread and yet the…
BY JEFFREY ISAAC Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He posted these thoughts about reopening IU on his personal blog, and we are reposting them with his permission. On Thursday, May 21, I received an e-mail from Indiana University President Michael McRobbie addressed to all IU colleagues.…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement of solidarity with essential workers today: We all have been touched by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Our system of higher education has been upended in the course of only a few weeks. AAUP members in medical school and health center chapters and…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The coronavirus pandemic has hit. The nation and the economy are in a free fall. Your college has closed and your college administration is announcing how there is nothing to see over here because the faculty—those miraculous, mythical, shapeshifting creatures—have morphed overnight from classroom teachers to “online educators” engaged in “online learning”…
BY AARON BARLOW Listen to our students. That’s the best way for us teachers to craft a successful end to a disrupted semester in a nation in crisis. After Kent State in 1970, we students at Utica College (like our contemporaries all over the country) shut our campus down. Under the leadership of faculty, however,…
BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…
