Cary Nelson

Save the World on Your Own Time. Stanley Fish. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Those of you who were at the AAUP’s annual meeting this year had the opportunity to attend our immensely successful international conference on academic freedom. From an experience that has often mixed moments of inspiration with the rhythms of an annual death march, the annual meeting overnight was transformed into a major intellectual event. The Chronicle of Higher Education alone carried nine separate stories about the conference. People enjoyed themselves. We will expand the conference next year.

For the past fifteen years, the state of Rhode Island has contracted with the University of Rhode Island to fund approximately ten graduate assistants in the physical therapy department in exchange for each providing ten hours a week of physical therapy to patients at Eleanor Slater Hospital, which houses patients with acute and long-term medical illness, as well as those with psychiatric disorders. But that funding was eliminated in the last round of state budget cuts. Those students are without funding and the patients are without physical therapy.

—Report of a union activist at the University of Rhode Island.

In fall 2007, the AAUP began sending out twice-monthly emails to nearly 400,000 faculty members nationwide. About 350,000 of those were nonmembers. We called attention to our key policy statements and reports, alerted people to emerging higher education issues, and publicized AAUP initiatives. As a result, many faculty members are better informed about what the AAUP is and what it does. Tens of thousands now have an intellectual, philosophical, political, and professional relationship with the AAUP that they did not have before.