US government

Save The Date For Capitol Hill Day

Concerned about the future of higher education? Worried about shrinking financial support for our students? Bothered by diminished funding for research? Apprehensive about the imposition of a No-Child-Left-Behind scenario at your college or university? Uneasy with increased federal security restrictions, surveillance, and secrecy? Want to do something about all these problems? Join the AAUP’s Government Relations Committee for Capitol Hill Day on Thursday, June 11, 2009.

From the President: Button Up

I was using my standard syllabus for my seminar in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay during the fall 2008 election season. As serendipity would have it, the night Barack Obama won the presidency the poems my students were assigned to read included Hughes’s “Children’s Rhymes.” Here is the second stanza:

By what sends

the white kids

I ain’t sent:

I know I can’t

be President.

Warmer Climate for Labor

In January, President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009—the first law enacted under his administration and the first step toward thawing the chill that characterized the federal government’s relationship with labor during the Bush administration.

Accountability, Bureaucratic Bloat, and Federal Funding of Higher Education

Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, chair of the House subcommittee on higher education, talked with Academe in April about why she believes higher education should not receive federal dollars and why higher education will need to "prove its worth" in the future.

DREAM Act Testimony

At the request of Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, AAUP government relations officer Nsé Ufot submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee for a June 28 hearing on the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would grant legal US residency to some undocumented immigrants after the successful completion of two years of college or military service. Writing on behalf of many faculty members, librarians, and academic professionals, and the millions of students they teach, support, and advise, Ufot urged that the DREAM Act be passed.

From the Editor: Doing More to Make Ourselves Heard

When my colleagues and I in the Virginia conference of the AAUP began holding an annual “Advocacy Day” at the state legislature in 2003, what we heard most often from our elected representatives was their surprise to learn that faculty members have a voice separate from that of university presidents. Accustomed as we are to arguing with our presidents, we were surprised that this fact was surprising to our legislators. The lesson learned was that we needed to do more to make ourselves heard.

Subscribe to US government