AAUP LA State Conference Newsletter – September 10, 2018

AAUP LA State Conference Newsletter – September 10, 2018 Louisiana members in national leadership Brooks Ellwood, Robey Clark Professor in Geology at LSU-Baton Rouge and incoming Chair of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, has been elected First Vice-President of AAUP at the national level. Linda Carroll, Professor Emerita of Italian at Tulane University, has elected to an at-large seat on National Council. Leslie Bary, Assistant Professor of Spanish at UL Lafayette, continues as District V Representative on National Council. Her article on organizing for AAUP is in the September/October issue of Academe. Louisiana chapters and membership Congratulations are extended to the AAUP members at Southern University in Baton Rouge, who organized as a chapter this spring. Statewide membership in AAUP at about 160. There are active chapters at LSU-BR, UL Lafayette, SU-BR, and SU-Shreveport, and reorganizing chapters at Tulane and Loyola-NO. We seek members at every institution, whether or not it has a chapter of its own, and we invite participation at the state conference level from everyone. LSU-Alexandria members plan to organize as a chapter in Spring, 2019. State conference leadership Elections for the 2018-2020 term were held at the April, 2018 meeting in Alexandria, and committee chairs…

Annual Meeting, April 21, 2018

Louisiana Conference AAUP Minutes of Annual Meeting 21 April, 2018 LSU-Alexandria Leslie Bary, Secretary The meeting was called to order at 1 PM by President Ravi Rau, who submitted a report of his activities in AY 2017-2018 (attached/appended, to be posted to website as AAUP State Conference Newsletter–April 21, 2018). Attending were Hugh Wilson, Vice-President, Brooks Ellwood, Past President, Leslie Bary, Secretary, Sudhir Trivedi, Chair, Committee A, Nigel Gwee, Tom Miller, and Brian Salvatore. Treasurer Michael Homan submitted a written report. We have over $17,000 in our account, of which some $1,000 a year is contributed by AAUP National. On behalf of the now dissolved Faculty Defense Committee, Sudhir Trivedi presented to us a check for $10,123.97. It was moved and voted (7 in favor, 1 abstention) that since the bulk of these funds were raised by faculty at Southern University-Baton Rouge, the new AAUP chapter at SUBR will be the first recipient of a portion of these funds. President Ravi Rau pointed out that AAUP National also has funds for chapter development, that can be applied for each year and that Louisiana AAUP chapters should take advantage of. Secretary Leslie Bary reported that formal minutes were not kept of…

AAUP LA State Conference Newsletter – November 1, 2017

Download PowerPoint Slides Southeast Regional Meeting    Hugh Wilson, Vice President, and Ravi Rau, President, attended a one-day meeting on Saturday, October 28, of the Southeast Regional Meeting of State Conference leaders, held at Clayton State University in Atlanta. Organized by Robert Scott, Anne Richards, and Joe Carrado of the Georgia State Conference, guests from AAUP headquarters were Julian Madison, AAUP national chair of the committee on historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), and Brian Turner, President of AAUP’s Association of State Conferences. Both spoke and led discussions on a variety of topics of concern to most faculty, especially in our region. The Southeast region is defined loosely, stretching from Texas to Florida and north to Virginia and Maryland, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In opening the meeting, Robert Scott pointed to the common problems our universities face, that we may well be the canary on threats to public education. Our region also houses many HBCUs who have got short shrift as state government funds have shrunk for all. Dr. Madison spoke about the current atmosphere with the White House promoting division rather than unity, and corporations trying to take over K-12 education and lowering the worth of a…

Newsletter: President’s Report October 22, 2017

Under the joint auspices of the Louisiana Conference and the LSU-Baton Rouge chapter of AAUP, a meeting was held on the LSU campus on the morning of Saturday, October 21. Twenty AAUP members from the LSU and SU (Southern University) campuses in Baton Rouge and a couple from the UL (University of Louisiana) campus in Lafayette attended, to hear a presentation by Dr. Brian Turner (Randolph-Macon College, Virginia), President of the Association of State Conferences. Discussion continued over box lunches. Some notable items: Among the principal roles of state conferences is to provide campus chapters: Solidarity (a sense of “you are not alone”), Collective Advocacy (for all faculty, across varied campuses and faculty ranks, tenure or non-tenure, contingent or permanent), government and relations to Boards (of Supervisors and Regents), media strategies (national AAUP is developing some for social media), and mobilization on behalf of beleaguered colleagues. Faculty cannot rely on campus administrators but should build relations themselves with the Legislature, Commissioners of Education, and Board of Regents, as well as with others such as the Teachers Retirement System and individual Boards of Supervisors. Both the State Conference and campus chapters should have a Committee A that handles questions of academic…