2023 AAUP Updates

The US Department of Education's proposal includes promising reforms that would help numerous borrowers. The proposal would lift the qualifying discretionary income cap, reduce monthly payments, and decrease time to forgiveness for those with undergraduate loans, providing much-needed relief. There is still work to do to ease the burden for all borrowers, including many graduate student and Parent PLUS loan borrowers.

The AAUP is troubled to learn that an art history instructor at Hamline University suffered repercussions from the university’s administration after showing a slide, in a class on Islamic art, of a fourteenth-century Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. According to news reports, the administration announced that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom” and declined to renew the adjunct instructor’s appointment, asserting that “because the instructor was an adjunct, her dismissal was not a firing.”