Affordability

Social Protest and the Future of Higher Education in Puerto Rico

Hidden from the eyes of the world, the most intense struggle for democracy and public education since the 1960s is now under way in Puerto Rico. The outcome is uncertain.

Budget Cuts and Educational Quality

Policy makers—and the public—need to understand the potentially devastating effects of cuts to higher education.

New Universities

For public universities in states like Washington, the temptation to privatize is becoming overwhelming.

Intellectual Life and the University of Commerce

A revaluation of teaching could help British universities cope with the government’s destructive reforms.

Academic Freedom and Indentured Students

Discussion of academic freedom usually focuses on faculty, and it usually refers to speech. That is the gist of the 1915 General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, appearing in the inaugural AAUP Bulletin as a kind of mission statement. The report invokes the ideals of the German tradition, “Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit,” or freedom of teachers and freedom of students, in the first sentence, but the remainder of the document talks about the freedom of professors.

Occupy Education

March 1 was a national day of action for the Occupy Education movement. At campuses across the country, students, faculty, and staff organized protests, marches, sit-ins, and other nonviolent actions to draw attention to funding cuts, student debt, and the growing corporatization of higher education.

From the Editor: No Entrance

Three years ago, I became the editor of Academe. This is my last issue. Editing the magazine has been enormously rewarding.

Though I’m a pessimist, I often remain cheerful. Even when I think the glass is two-thirds empty, I can find ways to enjoy whatever juice is left in the bottom. Still, I’m shocked by how much worse off higher education is now than it was when I became editor. By almost every measure. Of all of the things that dismay and exercise me, of the multitude of scandals and crises in higher education, one subsumes them all.

A Journalist's View of the Assault on Public Education

As the united voice of the scholars and teachers at our nation’s colleges and universities, the AAUP has never been more needed than it is today and more crucial to the fierce debate raging across the land, from the poorest public school districts to the most elite private universities, over what American education will look like in the twenty-first century and what role the faculty, the workforce of the education industry, will play.

CUNY and the Erosion of Public Higher Education

The crisis of CUNY, the City University of New York, has finally entered the public arena. As David Chen pointed out in a May 2016 article in the New York Times, and as many others have observed, conditions at CUNY have become untenable: buildings are falling apart; mice and roaches are common; ceilings leak; elevators and bathrooms don’t work.

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