BY MELISSA CHADBURN In 2023, I was confounded by my humanness as I entered my first full-time visiting faculty position in my mid-forties. The brain fog. The creeping anxiety. Feeling my confidence…

BY KATIE RAINWATER This post follows up on, and covers new developments related to, the author’s June 15 Academe Blog post. In June, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACSCOC)…

Valerie Surrett reviews Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters by Eve Darian-Smith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).

Robert Post reviews The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education by Brian Soucek.

BY D.J. HOPKINS AND ZACH JUSTUS It’s time for your department to produce its annual assessment report. You and your colleagues have agreed on the learning outcomes to measure, and you have the data…

This chapter profile is part of the preview of the fall 2026 issue of Academe. The full issue will be released in October.

BY ROGER OCHSE I ran a company for fourteen years, sold it in 1990, and chose a classroom over a boardroom. I’ve taught college classes for more than forty years total, some of which overlapp…

A measure of academic freedom could make college rankings more reflective of the conditions under which education occurs.

State laws are targeting the curriculum, pedagogy, and student support. How should faculty members navigate the new legal environment?

Academia must organize now to secure the future of the US academic research enterprise.

BY MATTHEW BOEDY Fears About Working Conditions Deepen for Faculty in the South The annual Faculty in the South Survey reveals optimism about AI but worsening fears about the impacts of government …

BY GRANT MINCY Buried inside the Department of Education’s proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule sits a single provision, § 602.23(j), that reads on the surface lik…

The Trump administration has said it will end the tax-exempt status for universities with programs that help racial minority students.

BY B. M. RYAN In Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, Frank Bruni’s intervention into the admissions debate was built around a stabilizing claim: Where yo…

BY SYDNEY FREEMAN, JR. Too many scholars of color are leaving the academy, and too few higher education organizations, faculty senates, and faculty advocates are doing tangible work to combat this.…

BY MATTHEW BOEDY Please share widely. Faculty in the South Colleague: That’s you in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,…

BY JAMES RIVER ROBBINS I was at an educators’ union meeting recently when a member raised the issue of reproductive care. Their argument was simple: With institutions and governments cutting …

BY HANK REICHMAN What might celebrated incidents of “academic misconduct,” specifically plagiarism and falsifications, tell us about the crisis of academia?  Recent events offer some su…

BY VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY AAUP The Vanderbilt University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) registers its profound disagreement with the Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s …

BY HANK REICHMAN “If at first you don’t succeed . . .”  The Trump administration is at it again.  With their much-ballyhooed “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education&#822…

A new AAUP report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," exposes how the Trump administration has extended its pay-to-play approach to gov...

BY EILEEN BORIS AND KRISTIN AHLBERG In an interview with journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Donald Trump claimed to be a great man, on par with world-shattering figures like Mao, Napole…

BY KEVIN W. CAPEHART In the last century, higher education evolved from serving an elite few to schooling a slightly broader swath of students. Yet even in the twenty-first century, too many univer…

BY DANIEL SPARKS Federal and state policy landscapes are changing rapidly in higher education. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes a “do no economic harm” a…

BY JOAN W. SCOTT Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber has carefully curated his public reputation as a defender of free speech and academic freedom against the wanton attacks by the…

BY PRISCILLA JEBARATNAM Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming workplace practices, including how employee performance is assessed. Organizations are increasingly adopting AI-enabled …

BY GRANT A. MINCY Last year, when Tennessee’s HB2194 threatened to eliminate faculty peer review from tenure termination proceedings across the Tennessee Board of Regents system, those of us …

BY ROBERT OVETZ The wave of unionization in higher education over the past decade has resulted in a new breakthrough. The first exclusive student worker union at a community college has been certif…

BY DANIEL A. SEGAL We—meaning both faculty and the AAUP—know that when our teaching and research disturb powerful interests, we risk repression on our campuses from administrators, trustees, donors…

BY ION MORARU, NEENA QASBA, AND MARK MACIEJEWSKI This op-ed was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror on June 16, 2026. Two Connecticut chapters successfully pushed the state legislature a…

BY KATIE RAINWATER In 2011, Eric Barron, the then-president of Florida State University, gave a presentation to FSU’s board of trustees. His talk concerned how Florida could adopt and exceed the “7…

The Trump administration is continuing its assault on higher education, but in a departure from its earlier high-profile fights with individual institutions like Harvard, it is now rewriting the feder...

BY BRITT PARIS As AI companies are flailing, financial forecasters warn of an AI bubble. There is an extensive list of harms AI poses to workers, students, communities, the environment, and the soc…

This year's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession finds that faculty salaries are still losing ground to inflation and expands data collection on part-time faculty pay.

BY MARTHA LINCOLN AND MARTHA KENNEY Earlier this spring, we published an essay in Academe about the California State University’s secretive and costly initiative to provide ChatGPT Edu, a general-p…

BY JONATHAN REES I wrote the first draft of “The AI Nuisance,” my contribution to the latest issue of Academe on artificial intelligence, back in November. The AI news kept coming at such a fast pa…