How The University Works

Many thanks for the suggestions on the Academic Labor Bookshelf. Later in the summer, I’ll reissue it, revised, expanded, and with commentary.
A couple of weeks back, I linked to a report by Phil Jack on AFT’s Face Talk about the case of Margaret West, a 20-year veteran part-timer at Edmonds Community College in Washington State, […]

Last week I posted on the scary case of Juan Hong, a tenured full professor at UC Irvine, who was retaliated against for his speech in connection with his governance duties. Because he dissented from the majority on a couple of personnel decisions, and expressed concern about the impact of nontenurable hiring on undergraduate […]

A California court upholds UC-Irvine’s retaliation against engineering prof Juan Hong for complaining about permatemping–are you next?
AAUP senior counsel Rachel Levinson has taken to sending occasional emails to AAUP members about the truly scary state of case law affecting traditional faculty rights. Her latest, on the retaliation against Irvine professor Juan Hong for speech […]

With the whole first-time dad thing, I’ve been a bit behind on the video project! I have twenty interviews on the external hard drive and another thirty or so scheduled for this spring (I’m taking advantage of my book tour to collect more important testimony than my own). At the rate of one interview […]

“It’s broadly recognized, certainly by contingent faculty themselves, that they really don’t possess academic freedom,” Cary Nelson says, at least not “in the way that the American academy has assumed for basically half a century that everyone who teaches does.”
In the first segment of our interview, the 49th president of the AAUP suggests that the […]