AAUP Presents

As student debt has grown astronomically over the past few decades, topping $1.7 trillion in federal and privately held debt, there seemed a moment of (limited) hope over the summer after years of activism and pressure when the Biden administration announced a federal plan to cancel $10K of debt for most federal loan holders and $20K of debt for those who had received Pell Grants. That plan ground to a halt in November when Republican-led courts halted the program. In this episode we discuss the current state of student debt in the U.S., how we got here, and where we could go next.

The episode's guests are Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and the author of Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt, and Charlie Eaton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, where he co-founded the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy Lab. He is the author of Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education.
Links:

• “American Higher Education’s Past Was Gilded, Not Golden," Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Academe, Fall 2022
• “Student Debt Cancellation on Campus," Charlie Eaton, Academe, Fall 2022
• College Score Card from the Department of Education with information on debt held by students
• "The Private Side of Public Universities: Third party providers and platform capitalism," Laura T. Hamilton, Heather Daniels, Christian Michael Smith, and Charlie Eaton, University of California, Merced, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, June 2022
• Information on SUMMER debt counseling from the AAUP
• The Debt Collective
• Cancel My Student Debt

Visit our website aaup.org for more information on our work.

In this episode we discuss the Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project, a student voter registration project that aims to increase student voter registration and turnout by asking faculty to devote five minutes of class time to voter education and on-the-spot voter registration.

The guests are Sam Novey, Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and Michael Rosenblum, professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University and affiliate of the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute for strengthening global democracy. He is an AAUP member in the Johns Hopkins chapter of the AAUP.
Episode links:

• Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project registration form

We’re returning to the topic of student debt after this week’s arguments before the Supreme Court over the Biden administration’s student debt relief program. Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP’s general counsel and a professor of labor and employment law in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Jenna Sablan, AAUP’s senior program officer for government relations, weigh in on what happened at the high court this week and what's next.
In August, the Department of Education announced that borrowers with federally-held loans making less than $125K for individuals or $250K for households would be eligible for up to $20,000 in debt relief to Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 in debt relief to non-Pell Grant recipients. On February 28, the justices heard two cases challenging the debt relief plan, one from six Republican-led states and one from two individuals.
The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer.

Links:

• AAUP Files Brief Supporting Student Debt Relief
• The Past, Present, and Future of the Student Debt Crisis (AAUP Presents, Season 1, Episode 11)
  

In this episode we discuss the AAUP’s new investigative report on the summary suspension and dismissal of Dr. Mark McPhail, at Indiana University Northwest.

In September 2021, the administration dispatched campus police officers to McPhail’s home to inform him that he had been dismissed and banned from campus, supposedly for making racially charged threats of physical violence. No accuser was identified, and no criminal charges were filed.

An AAUP investigation found that, in acting against McPhail, the administration disregarded AAUP-supported standards of academic due process. The committee deemed “implausible” the charge that McPhail had made violent threats, and it found “highly credible” McPhail’s allegation that the administration’s actions were prompted by his criticism of the administration’s handling of racial equity issues and therefore violated his academic freedom.
The guests are Afshan Jafar, a professor of Sociology at Connecticut College, and the chair of the investigative committee for the report, and Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, who staffed the investigation. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP’s digital organizer.
Links:

• Read the full investigative report here
• The Disenchantment of a Black Professor, Oyin Adedoyin, The Chronicle, May 2022

In this episode we sit down with Professor Lori Latrice Martin, an associate dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, to discuss her article “Black Out: Backlash and Betrayal in the Academy and Beyond,” which examines what Professor Martin describes as the "predictability of efforts to silence conversations and actions related to combating anti-Blackness in America and the continued use of Black deaths to further the social, economic, and political progress of non-Black groups in the academy and beyond" in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. You can find the article in the most recent edition of AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom; the entire issue is devoted to the intersection of disinformation and academic freedom.
Links:

• "Black Out: Backlash and Betrayal in the Academy and Beyond," Lori Latrice Martin, Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 13, 2022
• "Racial Realism," Derek Bell, Connecticut Law Review, 1992
• Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 13, 2022

Visit our website at aaup.org for more information on our work.