BY HANK REICHMAN The headlines tell the tale: “Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.;” “More than 1,900 scientists write letter in ‘SOS’ over Trump’s attacks on science.” But it’s less a new story than a continuation of an old one, for the Trump regime’s war on science dates back at least…
BY ANNA MCCARTHY Academic life has never been more precarious. The Trump administration’s attack on research, on free speech, and on student activism—an attack on the core ideals of the university—builds on decades of economic and political assault on the higher education workforce. Weakening faculty governance has long been the goal of boards of trustees.…
BY FACULTY LETTER ORGANIZERS The open letter discussed below originated after a group of faculty began to share notes about how their universities were handling the challenges presented by the Trump administration and about the apparent lack of communication or coalition building across institutions. In response to escalating federal attacks on higher education, a national…
BY JONATHAN REES My chapter is planning its National Day of Action for Higher Education event on April 17. Up to this point in time, we’ve been tightly focused on organizing to improve faculty salaries, but looking around at the world today the need to broaden our scope seemed clear. It is time to get…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today I attended one of the over 275 “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations outside of DOGE Dictator Elon Musk’s dealerships nationwide. This one was on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California, where at its height I would estimate some 800-1000 people gathered to voice our outrage at the ongoing Republican coup. It was a spirited…
BY HANK REICHMAN Given the daily fire hose of mostly unconstitutional (if not simply illegal) assaults by the Trump regime on the rights of immigrants, on “DEI,” on trans people, on the legal profession, on the judiciary, on social security and the Veterans’ Administration, and, of course, of most direct concern to readers of this…
BY REBECCA DOLHINOW AND DAVID SCHULTZ Rebecca Dolhinow of California State University, Fullerton, and David Schultz of Hamline University seek chapter proposals for an edited book anthology tentatively entitled Trumpism and the Corporate University. Trumpism and the Corporate University will be an edited volume that examines the rise of the corporate university over the last…
BY BARRY TRACHTENBERG Columbia University’s decision to accept and even go beyond the Trump administration’s extortionist demands forces us to recognize a sobering truth that applies not only to Columbia but to far too many of the scholarly spaces within which we work: Their response is neither a surrender nor a capitulation but is a…
BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ The inexplicable budget cuts my financially-solvent university enacted through its 2023–24 APR process both portended and was practice for our current moment. The “headwinds,” justifications for why the university had to cut twenty programs before new system-wide performance-based metrics formally went into effect, have unsurprisingly arrived. If anyone working inside the university…
BY HANK REICHMAN I am thrilled to announce that today, March 25, the second edition of my book, Understanding Academic Freedom, is officially published. In the first edition, published in late 2021, I sought to provide educators and others a basic introduction and guide to principles of academic freedom. But by early last year it…
Thank you, Dwayne Booth, both for making this and for giving me permission to reproduce it here. Those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Fish’s incredible art work and political cartooning might want to visit this instagram page.
Given the news today (March 21) that Columbia has caved, I am reposting this statement from the Columbia AAUP chapter, which was released on March 18. They clearly need to be in charge of Columbia not its Board of Trustees and the President who works for it. The Assault on Columbia University by Columbia University…
BY JENNIFER RUTH In a review in spring 2022, which seems a century ago, I wrote that “an irony or paradox adheres to [Ellen Schrecker’s book] The Lost Promise in that this riches-to-rags story leaves readers not dispirited but inspired.” Although Schrecker’s book traces the seemingly lost promise of the 60s’ dream of free public…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following extraordinary statement was published today in the New York Review of Books and is reposted here with their permission. The statement’s signatories include virtually every leading First Amendment scholar in the country, conservative and liberal. Among the signatories are Eugene Volokh and Michael McConnell, arguably the two most prominent…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY Here in Georgia in the last few days: Lawmakers failed to pass a bill to end DEI in student activities and programs in our public university system. The bill would have codified into law policy moves already done to erase DEI in the last year by our system administration. One of our…
