In this episode we discuss the Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project, a student voter registration project that aims to increase student voter registration and turnout by asking faculty to devote five minutes of class time to voter education and on-the-spot voter registration.The guests are Sam Novey, Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and Michael Rosenblum, professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Universi...
In this episode we discuss academic boycotts and the AAUP's revised policy on boycotts, released this August. We’ll hear more about the statement, how it came about, and where it fits in the current debates about academic freedom in higher education. The guests are Rana Jaleel, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis and chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Risa L. Lieberwitz, a professor at the Cornell University School of Industri...
In this episode, I discuss the AAUP’s involvement in the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1950s and 1960s as it related to higher ed with Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, dean of the graduate school and professor of social and cultural foundations in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Drawing on her recently published article of the same name in AAUP's Academe, we discuss how Black private institutions, Black public institutions, and white public institutions in the period approac...
As campus protests in support of Palestine are met with often violent and repressive crackdowns, we talk to three faculty members, all AAUP members, who report on what's happening at their respective campuses. We speak to Annelise Orleck at Dartmouth College, whose arrest at a May 1 protest at Dartmouth garnered significant press coverage, Todd Wolfson at Rutgers University, where faculty supported students as they came to a negotiated solution to end their encampment, and Nivedita Maju...
As violent, militarized responses to protests on campuses across the country continue, in this episode we look at how political interference in higher education has expanded in dangerous ways. We discuss how the right (and increasingly the center) have demonized higher education as a public good, and examine the historical origins of the current onslaught of political interference in higher ed.Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut g...
In this episode we dive into how data, educational technologies (or “EdTech”), and other technological forces are shaping and sometimes harming higher education. The guests are Martha Fay Burtis, an associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, and Jesse Stommel, a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver and cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy.In a recent article for the AAUP'...
Faculty and student groups at more than 50 U.S. college and university campuses will hold a National Day of Action for Higher Education on Wednesday, April 17 in a coordinated nationwide counterprotest against the sustained right-wing assault on American higher education as a public good.Organizers say the Day of Action for Higher Education will demonstrate how cross-rank organizing, robust faculty governance, labor solidarity, and protection of the freedom to teach and learn are crucial to t...
From Florida to Texas to Ohio to Indiana politicians in some states are trying to substitute their own ideological beliefs for educational freedom by passing legislation that interferes with how colleges and universities operate. They’re introducing bills that mandate or prohibit content in the classroom, empower partisan political appointees to determine campus policy, limit the freedom to learn, teach, and conduct research.In this episode we look at member-led efforts to fight legisla...
In this podcast we discuss the AAUP's special report Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System. The report offers an in-depth review of a pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida, which have largely occurred during the term of Governor Ron DeSantis. The guests are Afshan Jafar, a professor of Sociology at Connecticut College and a co-chair of the special committee, Henry Reic...
In this episode, Michaele Turnage Young, a senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, discusses this summer’s Supreme Court affirmative action decision and talks about how creating equity in higher ed requires reimagining and reexamining what the education system can do to expand access to higher education. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer. Show Notes: AAUP resources on diversity in higher educationThe Legal Defense Fund website
In this episode, we discuss the unprecedented strike earlier this year at Rutgers University with Todd Wolfson, the president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Of the strike and their common good model of organizing, he had this to say: “For 50 years, I’d say public universities have been on the defensive.” Now, he said, “I think we turned the tables and we moved the ball perceptively in the other direction.” The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer. Episode li...
In this episode we talk to Atia Sattar, an associate professor (teaching) in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California, about the article she wrote for AAUP’s Academe magazine entitled “Academic Motherhood and the Unrecognized Labors of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Women of Color.”In it, she wrote, “while women in higher education often face a career penalty for their struggles with infertility and motherhood, women of color do so wi...
In this episode we examine the changing higher ed landscape after the Supreme Court decision in the case Students for Fair Admissions, INC, v. President and Fellows of Harvard College which effectively ended effectively end race-conscious admissions.The guests are Charles Toombs and Risa Lieberwitz. Charles Toombs, a Professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University and president of the California Faculty Association. He is the immediate past chair of AAUP's Committee A on Academic ...
In this episode we focus on AAUP’s work around racial justice. This is the first in a series of podcasts this season that will examine issues around the fight for greater racial equity in higher education. Tune in to hear our discussion about efforts to restrict teaching about race, the racial equity initiative at the AAUP, and what's ahead. The guest are Irene Mulvey and Glinda Rawls. Irene Mulvey is the president of the AAUP. She taught mathematics for 40 years, first at Swarthmo...
We’re returning to the topic of student debt after this week’s arguments before the Supreme Court over the Biden administration’s student debt relief program. Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP’s general counsel and a professor of labor and employment law in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Jenna Sablan, AAUP’s senior program officer for government relations, weigh in on what happened at the high court this week and what's next. In August, the Department of ...
In this episode we discuss the AAUP’s new investigative report on the summary suspension and dismissal of Dr. Mark McPhail, at Indiana University Northwest. In September 2021, the administration dispatched campus police officers to McPhail’s home to inform him that he had been dismissed and banned from campus, supposedly for making racially charged threats of physical violence. No accuser was identified, and no criminal charges were filed. An AAUP investigation found tha...
As student debt has grown astronomically over the past few decades, topping $1.7 trillion in federal and privately held debt, there seemed a moment of (limited) hope over the summer after years of activism and pressure when the Biden administration announced a federal plan to cancel $10K of debt for most federal loan holders and $20K of debt for those who had received Pell Grants. That plan ground to a halt in November when Republican-led courts halted the program. In this episode we discuss ...
In this episode we sit down with Professor Lori Latrice Martin, an associate dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, to discuss her article “Black Out: Backlash and Betrayal in the Academy and Beyond,” which examines what Professor Martin describes as the "predictability of efforts to silence conversations and actions related to combating anti-Blackness in America and the...
On April 28 the AAUP released a report of the Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina System. The report considers the influence of the North Carolina state legislature on the systemwide board of governors and campus boards of trustees. It discusses how political pressure and top-down leadership have obstructed meaningful faculty participation in the UNC system, jeopardized academic freedom, and reinforced instituti...
In this episode we discuss AAUP’s recently released statement from Committee A, Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism, which addresses partisan efforts in state legislatures to enact bills targeting teaching about Israel and about the history of racism in the United States, in ways that present a significant threat to academic freedom. The guests are Rana Jaleel, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the Universit...