UCONN AAUP Lecture Series: Professor Emeritus Ellen Schrecker
“Hired Education: Corporatization, Academic Freedom, and the Role of Faculty Unions”
America’s colleges and universities are in trouble – and have been for years. Relentless cut-backs in the public sector deprive our students of the high quality education they deserve. In response to those cut-backs, academic leaders are turning toward the private sector, courting corporations and adopting business values. As they focus ever more narrowly on their bottom lines, they are losing sight of their traditional mission of furthering knowledge and educating human beings. In the process, they are also marginalizing their faculties, putting academic freedom at risk, and making it increasingly more difficult for college and university teachers to carry out their professional responsibilities as scholars and educators. If we are to prevent American higher education from becoming a junior partner of the business world and abandoning its obligations to the common good, we must help our colleagues, our students, and our fellow citizens understand this situation. Only then can we begin to organize ourselves to resist the forces of corporatization. Faculty unions like the AAUP are our best tools for doing so.
Speaker Bio:
Recently retired from Yeshiva University, historian Ellen Schrecker has written extensively about higher education and political repression. Among her books are No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986); The Age of McCarthyism (1994, rev. ed. 2002);Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (2010). A former editor of the AAUP’s journal, Academe, she is currently writing a book about faculty members during the 1960s and early 1970s.
When: Thursday 10/22/15, 1:00pm-3:00pm
Where: Storrs Student Union Theatre
This talk will be live-streamed/archived at https://mediasite.dl.uconn.edu/Mediasite/Play/ab718e02bc2c43d68bc30ac5a22ac5361d
For event flyer visit: http://www.uconnaaup.org/events/uconn-aaup-lecture-series-professor-ellen-schrecker/
For more information, contact: Chris Henderson, AAUP at chenderson@uconnaaup.org