Contact Us / Listservs Info
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USC-AAUP has two listservs; the moderated "United USC" list (formerly "Concerned Faculty"), which is a high-traffic environment; and the main AAUP list which is low traffic, pertaining to chapter business and announcements, not currently moderated, and we only use non-USC emails on it. People can manually unsubscribe from either without involving moderators. People can subscribe to either or both by sending an email to aaup.usc@gmail.com .
Purpose of United USC Listserv
The U-USC moderated list operates for the specific purpose of providing a forum for USC faculty to engage in a free discussion about the potential response of faculty to USC governance, practices and policies.
Rules of Engagement
This is not a free-speech-absolutist forum. No hateful or intolerant speech. [1a, 1b, 1c]
Posts should focus on university-related issues. [2]
Link sharing is allowed, but links that do not come with an accompanying message to contextualize relevance or intent may not be forwarded to the list. [3]
Moderators are human beings, your colleagues, acting in good faith, sometimes short on time or sleep. Please keep this in mind.
U-USC should not be considered a “secure” environment. At the same time, we expect list members to exercise discretion and courtesy, i.e. to treat this forum as a private conversation amongst faculty and not forward list email.
1a. This includes the re-posting of such speech by third parties, and we ask for special care around the undefined use of politically contested keywords.
1b. Speech that can be construed as advocating hateful or intolerant positions due to poor logic, unfair assumptions, stereotyping, and other critical errors that we call out in our classrooms, will not be accepted, but the moderators will explain to the participant why the post was rejected and allow them to revise and re-submit.
1c. We ask for community understanding with community use of highly contested keywords, such as ‘genocide’ or ‘intifada’. Our editorial rule is that we ask posters to choose their words carefully, in acknowledgment that the moderator team does not edit posters’ speech, and that some language may be perceived as inflammatory by other readers/posters. Moderators are committed to forwarding campus members’ good faith, politically contestable speech above censoring campus members’ speech that does not violate rule 1. Moderators may intervene into discussions that take the list off topic by devoting attention to general adjudication of the correctness or the implications of keywords. By contrast, debating speech or word choice for the purposes of a co-authored document related to governance is certainly allowed.
2. We understand that broader global issues, such as geo-political conflicts and the future of the global economy, are important, but there are sufficient venues outside of this list for debating such topics.
3. Moderators do not have time to review posted links, therefore posters should provide clear framing as to their intent in sharing said link (i.e., is this a resource, do you support it, is this an example of something you don’t support, etc.)