North Carolina Conference of the AAUP

@ncaaup.bsky.social

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We are an association of all AAUP members in North Carolina #highered. Join us as we advocate for all faculty and instructors through the state. Become involved in a local chapter or start one! AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL! https://www.aaupnc.org/

Abstract
This essay offers a collaborative reflection on feminist academic labor under the current conditions of intensified state surveillance, political attack, and institutional precarity. Written by three faculty members in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNC Greensboro, the authors use the figure of stalking to name the intimate, psychic dimensions and practical ramifications of the attacks on feminist programs. They argue that their labor demands forms of judgment and compromise that are rarely legible as feminist practice, even as their work is shaped by feminist commitments to care, collective responsibility, and critical inquiry.

Since taking office, the Trump Administration has instituted multiple changes that threaten funding for science in the US. Congress has pushed back, passing budgets that continue to provide strong support for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other science agencies. In response, the Administration has sought to restrict and control science funding by other means. On May 29, Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, issued a set of proposed changes that would dramatically alter federal funding across the board, including funding for science. These sweeping changes would, among other things, reduce the role of peer review by making all grant decisions occur at the discretion of a political appointee, allow grant termination without cause, mandate that funding fit the “Administration's priorities” rather than being governed by scientific merit, seriously restrict foreign collaborations, and have other effects that will seriously damage the science enterprise in America. Similar rules will apply to all federal funding, from that for social science, the arts, and humanities to funding for programs that meet basic human needs. Science magazine has a good summary of some of the most impactful changes.

Of all the actions taken by the Administration with respect to federal funding, this is the most far-reaching and impactful. Scientific societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, are mobilizing their members to respond. There is a straightforward mechanism for the public to comment. Former NIH program officer Elizabeth Ginexi has written an exceptionally helpful guide on how to do so, with detailed suggestions. She emphasizes the value of individual comments that address specific provisions rather than form letters, and gives details you will need to write and submit an effective comment. She offers examples for people at all career stages and for concerned members of the public…

Longtime Rep. Shelly Willingham of Edgecombe County lost to Patricia Smith, a minister and small business owner from Williamston. Willingham was the only Democrat last year to vote for a bill to allow non-public school employees and volunteers to carry a firearm on campus with written permission and a concealed carry permit.

And in Mecklenburg County, Democratic primary voters ousted Reps. Nasif Majeed and Carla Cunningham. Majeed was the lone Democrat to support new restrictions on LGBTQ people. Cunningham faced criticism for her vote and speech in favor of a bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate more closely with ICE. Gov. Josh Stein had endorsed her opponent, Charlotte pastor Rodney Sadler.

Decolonising data is not about renouncing data per se, but about embracing models that produce convivial data: data that can help us relate to each other responsibly and better, and that can help us protect each other and the environment. And the core, once again, is our human creativity and imagination.

He concluded, “discussions regarding program review, resource allocation, enrollment trends, and long-term commitments should occur earlier. Faculty, administrators, and Trustees would all be better served if these considerations were addressed before recommendations reach the final approval stage rather than after substantial time and resources have already been invested.”

Fleming: All the instances of which I’m aware in which a major university department was disbanded or taken under the wing of a dean did not have to do with an erosion of disciplinary standards, but rather some sort of deep dysfunction at an interpersonal level between the members of the department. I think that’s entirely right. It would be pretty grave if deans, provosts, presidents, vice chancellors put departments into receivership because they were doing a kind of work with which the administration disagreed, or of which the administration took a dim view. I want to be perfectly clear that I don’t see that going on out there, and if we did see it going on, I would expect there to be distress, if not outrage.

“For young people who are coming up, especially in their teens and 20s, there are a lot of group chats and underground communities where they say edgy things they don’t really mean just to get a rise out of others,” he said. “No sensible, rational person really believes this. It was meant in jest.”

Nothing in Rufo’s record indicates he’s qualified to speak about the state of higher education. He’s done no academic research and admitted that his crusade against critical race theory relied upon misrepresentation. Even Republican allies view Rufo’s trusteeship at Florida’s New College as an unmitigated disaster, complete with faculty purges, an ousted president, a grossly ballooning budget and a significant drop in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. Despite his record of failure, my university’s new center paid him more for his hour of propaganda than most University of Iowa graduate students make in a year as teaching assistants.

Jay Smith, a UNC history professor and former president of the North Carolina chapter of the AAUP, said the Martin Center contributors are ideologues who lack scholarly discipline.

“Like the various other right-wing initiatives that have sprouted at UNC in the past five to 10 years, the Martin Center speaks in euphemisms and seemingly value-neutral language, but their agenda has long been clear,” Smith said in a statement. “They want to remake our universities as incubators of capitalist values.”

According to Shibley, who is also a Martin Center board member, the organization prioritizes bipartisan civics and free market education models.

“It’s less of a culture war thing and more of a, ‘How can we most effectively spend the state’s money on education and engage in reform?’” Shibley said. “So that, you know, everybody can make their own mind up.”

Northeastern University has been extending its campus and scope across the globe, and it now has campuses in around a dozen cities that help boost the university’s scholarly and research capacity. Along with dozens of new institutes, the new campuses operate like enterprise zones free from the restrictions of long, arduous governance deliberation. The university’s experiential learning lab and center on experiential AI are also seeking to push the boundaries of experiential education well beyond current practice.

The new federal grant for UNC-Chapel Hill — a $10-million match for fund-raising efforts, and $100,000 outright — will help its School of Civic Life and Leadership establish an endowment, which will support eight professorships in American Political Tradition, Great Books and Leadership, and the Classical Tradition. 

The hiring process at Chapel Hill’s school has been the subject of controversy and linked to the resignation of the university’s former provost, Chris Clemens, who had lobbied to create the school and then became mired in a power struggle, The Assembly reported, after opposing the idea of affirmative action for conservative scholars. The university began an investigation of the school in September after a wave of faculty and administrative turnover.

Hans said in an interview on UNC-TV this week that the university will protect academic freedom. Academic freedom is “a bedrock principle embedded in the DNA of the university,” he said. “We’re committed to the freedom of our faculty to pursue knowledge without fear of censorship or punishment. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t change. What has changed, of course, is the political climate that we live in. And people being very critical of any teaching or research that they may not agree with.” Publishing syllabi is part of a national trend as conservative states have pushed for a closer view of public university courses and academic research projects. Public universities in Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Utah, Florida and Georgia have laws or policies requiring public posting of course syllabi.

One member of the audience at my IU lecture used the board’s big middle finger to the faculty as proof that resistance was futile—just like the actions I described in my lecture. I asked the audience, “after you voted no-confidence and the board then gave Whitten a bonus, what did you do next?” The president of the Bloomington Faculty Council who’d gotten the remarkable vote made a zero with his fingers. “It was followed by nothing,” he said.

Well ok, I said, you didn’t lose exactly. You just stopped playing. They didn’t stop playing. That doesn’t prove faculty can’t win. It proves you have to keep playing.

I was constantly impressed with how intelligent and committed academics are, including graduate students who are facing futures without proper support. We don’t appreciate that enough about ourselves. Everyone I met showed the intelligence and commitment that comes partly from the long process of building intelligence in teaching and research. These are real powers in the face of incessant negative propaganda and disrespect.

Hovering over all proposed solutions was the prospect of faculty unionization. That wasn’t because people agree that tenure-track faculty are ready to unionize—most thought they weren’t—but because the traditional alternative, collegial shared governance, has been unilaterally degraded or rejected by senior managers and boards. A lot of tenure-track faculty are now where graduate students were a few decades go.

Tenure-track as well as non-tenure track faculty do now need collective bargaining rights. But faculty won’t get them or get the public on their side or be clear about what to do once they have them unless they tell their stories, and never stop telling them, and never stop acting on them.

The image is a poster for the event described above. The poster contains a picture of Trump with a crown and a clown nose in the top right. In the bottom left are a group of inflatable frogs. The text on the poster reads:

Rally
UNC Rise Up
On the 1 year anniversary of Trump’s presidency
11/07 | at 1:15pm | Quad
Tell UNC: Reject Trump’s Compact

Professors Can Be Ignorant. That’s Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity.
A recent critique of the movement for intellectual pluralism fails.

Could the vetting processes work better? Sure. That’s no argument for abandoning how consensus is built in academic communities. Exposure to more unvetted views does not automatically bring one closer to the truth. This is a fallacy of viewpoint-diversity arguments whether we find them in personal anecdotes, Ohio SB1’s mandates, or Trump’s compact, which commanded universities to foster “a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus.” But as the law professor and leading academic-freedom theorist Robert Post writes, “Disciplines do not create expert knowledge through a marketplace of ideas in which content discrimination is prohibited and in which all ideas are deemed equal.” Instead, disciplines assume that some ideas are better than others.

When no discipline is safe from a mob shakedown, all of us who are truly concerned about what is happening need to stand together.
Post’s comment also underscores that “discrimination” is the wrong way to think about how we assess ideas in higher education. When the Trump compact demands an end to such discrimination, requiring that signatories commit to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” we are not even in the “free marketplace of ideas.” This is trade protection for bad ideas, ones too weak to defeat more convincing and well-researched ideas.

Finally, arguments against viewpoint diversity, and in support of academic freedom, should not be mistaken as complacency toward the academic status quo. Viewpoint diversity presents itself as the only alternative to conforming with orthodoxy, but we should reject that false choice.

Speakers at press conference

Earlier this year the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors published a critique of the school, stating that in 2024-25 it “established a record that should cause embarrassment to UNC’s leaders.” The statement noted that at least six of the nine Chapel Hill faculty members brought in to start the school have resigned, “citing defective leadership, mission drift, and shocking procedural irregularities.”
The statement on the campus AAUP website went on to describe the school as a “bureaucratic trainwreck,” “intellectually deficient” and representing “a gross political incursion into the curricular operations of our campus.”

Belle Boggs, the president of North Carolina’s statewide chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said faculty who have reviewed the standards so far are concerned about the framing of viewpoint diversity. “I will believe that this document, that this accrediting body, is nonideological when robust protections for academic freedom are within the accrediting body’s draft language,” she said. “Right now, it is not.”
Boggs remains skeptical of the whole accreditation project. “For this group of ideologues to claim that they’re going to create an independent, nonideological accreditation body — announced by Ron DeSantis — it’s immediately clear that this is politicizing our universities and will interfere with our ability to do our jobs, to recruit the best faculty, to recruit the best students,” she said.