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A University of Arizona classroom dialogue guide encourages professors to use the “Oops/ouch method,” where students who are offended in class say “ouch” and the offender responds with “oops.” The guide, published by the Office for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, provides outlines for how to encourage discussion about diversity in the classroom, explaining that “diversity poses both challenges and opportunities for a college campus.”

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (AP) - Nearly 600 faculty and staff have taken a voluntary retirement package from Penn State University, including more than 400 employees on the main campus. The Centre Daily Times (http://bit.ly/2mvKKvq ) reports 419 main campus employees took the offer, while 168 others did on satellite campuses. Forty-six percent of employees eligible for the early retirement took it, more than the university anticipated. Faculty 62 and older and staff 60 and older were eligible for a year's lump sum pay if they had at least 15 years' service.

Disgusting! More than 100 UC Berkeley faculty signed a petition to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking! More than 100 UC Berkeley faculty members signed a petition to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.This is absolutely disgusting.They ought to be ashamed of themselves.Here is the petition and the faculty members who signed it. (The document continues after the first set of signatures, and there are other signatures after that first set.)

Faculty at 14 Pennsylvania state universities went on strike Wednesday morning, affecting more than 100,000 students, after contract negotiations between the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and the faculty union hit an impasse. The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties announced on its website that its members went on strike at 5 a.m. because no agreement could be reached. The union represents more than 5,000 faculty and coaches across the state, and a walkout was expected to halt classes midsemester. […] This is the first strike in the system’s 34-year history. The union includes faculty from Bloomsburg,...

New videos have surfaced of a Yale professor being protested and yelled at by students for sending an email telling them to ignore people dressed in offensive or racist Halloween costumes. The fallout of the email saw Nicholas Christakis, the master of Silliman College at Yale, and his wife Erika, a faculty member, resign from their positions at the university. The new videos, which appeared on The Federalist, give a greater insight into what the students were demanding from Christakis, and his defense that cultural appropriation on Halloween is permissible. Many students in the mob of almost 100 can be...

Usually affirmative action diversicrats are sneaky enough to disguise their efforts to discriminate against targeted racial groups – almost always whites (because they are the majority) and Asians (because they study and work hard and achieve). They use code word language like “goals” and “diversity,” and avoid giving the impression that certain groups are ruled out from consideration. That’s what makes the honesty of a job posting at the state-funded University of Louisville so unusual.  Inside Higher Education (hat tip: Legal Insurrection) reports: can a department specifically reserve a position for an underrepresented minority candidate? That’s what some are...

He may not be getting as much attention as The Donald but Governor Scott Walker’s higher education reforms in Wisconsin are having a real world impact there. “Who wants to work in a state where tenure is an abstraction?,” Kelly Wilz, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County, writes in a column which appeared on the Academe Blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Apparently, not many of her colleagues, even the tenured ones. “The emails keep rolling in,” Wilz writes. “More colleagues leaving–not for better pay, not because they didn’t love their jobs, but...

Tenured faculty may make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the professoriate than in days gone by but they are hanging onto their jobs with both fists. “Tenured faculty age 50 or older can be divided into three groups—35 % expect to retire by normal retirement age; 16 % would prefer to retire by normal retirement age, but expect to work longer (i. e., they are ‘reluctantly reluctant’ to retire); and 49 % would like to and expect to work past normal retirement age (i.e., they are ‘reluctant by choice’),” economist Paul Yakoboski found. Yakoboski is a senior economist at...

The phrase is just one of many that faculty were advised not to use. A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression. According to the handout, called “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send,” the statement “assert[s] that race and gender [do] not play a role in life successes” — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions. Other microaggressions listed on the document include...

The demographic groups most underrepresented on law faculties include white Christians and Republicans, according to research by Northwestern University School of Law professor James Lindgren. His working paper, “Measuring Diversity: Law Faculties in 1997 and 2013,” challenges the notion that women and minorities are underrepresented in teaching the law. Those groups actually have made significant gains.... But viewpoint diversity did not improve. For example, 59 percent of lawyers in 2013 identified as white Christians, and that group comprised nearly 57 percent of the working population. Yet white Christians made up just 34 percent of law professors. Republican men comprised 23...

To its undying credit, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has questioned whether the academic freedom of a Catholic professor at a Jesuit university was violated. “Dr. John McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University, has sought the assistance of the American Association of University Professors as a result of having been informed, by letter of December 16, 2014, that the university was suspending him with pay ‘until further notice’ from his teaching responsibilities ‘and all other faculty activities’ and banning him from campus,” Gregory F. Scholtz of the AAUP wrote in a letter to Marquette’s president....

During the press briefing at the White House this afternoon, Josh Earnest was questioned about President Obama’s former colleagues at Harvard who are now complaining about the ACA they once supported. Harvard released a statement that the law is raising health insurance costs and therefore the university would have to change the plans for their staff. Ed Henry asked Earnest if it was “hypocritical” for these professors to claim that Obamacare was good for the country until they, themselves, had to pay more because of it. Earnest, for his part, seemed stumped by the question. He stuttered and stumbled through...

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism,...

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students. Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite. New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms. …

Four public colleges and universities: Florida’s Palm Beach State College, Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County, Ohio’s Youngstown State University, and New Jersey’s Kean University, are all planning to move adjunct and “contingent” faculty members to part-time status in order to avoid an Obamacare provision requiring businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for at least 95 percent of their workers. **SNIP** Teachers’ associations like AAUP and AFT are bracing for the shift. Next week, AFT will host a webinar for its members addressing “the implications of the Affordable Care Act for contingent faculty.” In the...

via Quran verse posted at US Harvard varsity – Emirates 24/7. Harvard University has posted a verse of the Holy Quran at the entrance of its faculty of law, describing the verse as one of the greatest expressions for justice in history, a Saudi newspaper reported on Sunday. Verse 135 of Sura Al Nisa (women chapter) has been posted at a wall facing the faculty’s main entrance, dedicated to the best phrases said about justice. A Saudi student who studies at Harvad published a picture of the poster in his Twitter page, according to the Saudi Arabic language daily Ajel....

Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) today released a 30 minute video showing how Northeastern Professor Denis Sullivan and other Northeastern faculty abuse academic freedom to promote anti-Israel lies and anti-Semitism as defined by the U.S. State Department. Sullivan is a tenured professor and director of the Northeastern Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development. The video examines Professor Sullivan's lectures, invited guests, reading lists and student trips to the Middle East, all of which seem designed to provide students with a one-sided view of the Arab-Israeli conflict. "It seems clear that Professor Sullivan has built his department to...

Iowa Republicans are taking aim at the state's top law school for denying a faculty position to a conservative law professor, who an assistant dean once said embraces politics the rest of the faculty "despises." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/05/iowa-republicans-blast-law-school-over-refusal-to-hire-conservative-professor/#ixzz1rH2eeqcX

After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. This calculation was based on a salary spiked by summer teaching, and since I no longer pay into the retirement fund, I now receive significantly more than when I “worked.” But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. Having overinvested in my retirement annuity, I received a fat refund and—when it rains, it pours—another for unused sick...

Why Campuses Are Blue Sheila Archambault, February 17, 2010 A key reason why few conservatives go into the teaching profession is that the job of a professor does not fit the image many conservatives have of themselves, two scholars argued. “The professoriate, along with a number of other knowledge work fields, has been ‘politically typed’ as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives,” Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross said in a working paper, entitled “Why Are Professors Liberal?” Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University was in agreement with Fosse’s...