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 University and affiliate of the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute for strengthening global democracy. He is an AAUP member in the Johns Hopkins chapter of the AAUP.

Episode links:

• Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project registration form 

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 Industrial and Labor Relations and the general counsel of the AAUP. She is also a member of Committee A.

Episode links:

• 2024 Statement on Academic Boycotts
• “The AAUP Has Always Defended Academic Freedom. We Still Do,” Rana Jaleel and Todd Wolfson, The Chronicle of HIgher Education, August 21, 2024 
• “The AAUP Is Right, Supporting Boycotts is Academic Freedom.”  Joan Wallach Scott, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2024
• “Changing My Mind About Boycotts, Joan W. Scott,” Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 4, 2013
•  2006 Statement on Academic Boycotts

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 approached the civil rights movement as it related to academic freedom on campus; Williamson-Lott gives us examples and perspective on how these different types of institutions “understood their self-interest differently.”   

Links:

"The AAUP and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1955–1965," Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, Academe, Spring 2024

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 Majumdar at John Jay College in the City University of New  York system, where 173 people were arrested during protest at the the end of April.  AAUP president Irene Mulvey also weighs in on the ongoing crackdown and threats to higher ed.

The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer.

Links:

• In Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses, AAUP statement and sign-on,  April 29, 2024
• "Police Treatment of a Dartmouth Professor Stirs Anger and Debate," The New York Times
• "Rutgers students — reluctantly — end Gaza solidarity encampment," New Jersey Monitor
• "CUNY and Columbia organizers hold press conference and rally after Tuesday police sweeps," The Colombia Spectator

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 guests. He is the director of the AAUP’s newly established Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, which will  examine and confront the recent surge of political and ideological attacks on American higher education. It was established by the AAUP with funding from the Mellon Foundation.  Jennifer Ruth,  a professor and associate dean at Portland State University also guests. She is the coauthor, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Valerie C. Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of the forthcoming The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom.

Links:

• "Subnational Authoritarianism and the Campaign to Control Higher Education," Jennifer Ruth, Academe
• Will Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech Survive? Inside Higher Ed
• In Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses, AAUP statement

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's Academe magazine, Burtis and Stommel explain how “increasingly, technology companies are treating educational institutions as conglomerations of data, reducing the human teachers, staff, and students to bits and binary. Too many of these companies are more interested in selling solutions to problems of data than they are in genuinely supporting the people represented by those data.” Listen for more.

Links:

• "Bad Data Are Not Better Than No Data,  Academe
• "Counter-friction to Stop the Machine: The Endgame for Instructional Design", Hybrid Pedagogy  
• "Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade and How to Stop,'" Hybrid Pedagogy 
• Design Forward faculty development program

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 the survival of higher education and to its vital social purpose in a democracy. 

In this episode host Mariah Quinn, the AAUP's digital organizer, talks to two of the organizers of the April 17 movement about how it came about and the path forward. Our guests are Rebecca Karl,  a professor of history at New York University and president of NYU-AAUP, and Amy Offner,  an associate professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and president of AAUP-Penn.

Links:

• Day of Action for Higher Education website

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 legislative interference in Texas and Ohio, specifically pushing back against bills targeting diversity equity and inclusion programs, tenure, and collective bargaining. We talk about each campaigns successes, failures, and the lessons learned.

The guests are Karma R. Chávez, the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves on the executive committee of the AAUP chapter, and Sara Kilpatrick, the AAUP Ohio Conference Executive Director. She previously worked as the political director for the Ohio Senate Democratic Caucus. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer.

Links:

• Lessons from AAUP Advocacy in Texas, Karma Chávez, Academe, Fall 2023
• A Provisional Victory in Ohio, Sara Kilpatrick, Academe, Fall 2023
• Ohio Conference website with information about SB 83
• AAUP UT Austin chapter website page tracking Texas higher ed bills
• AAUP resources on political interference

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 Reichman, professor of history California State University, East Bay, also a co-chair of the committee, and Liz Leininger, a neuroscience professor who was previously affiliated with New College. The program is hosted by Anita Levy, senior program officer in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance.

Show notes:

• Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System
• AAUP's Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities
• Resources from the AAUP on political interference in higher ed
• The Administrative Overhaul of New College of Florida, Inside Higher Ed, September 2023

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 education
• The Legal Defense Fund website