BY GRAHAM A. PECK Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020. A video of the address is available here. In 2017, I…
BY PATTY O’NEILL The op-ed below was originally published in the CT Mirror, and we are posting it here with the permission of the author. Our communities have been shaken to their core. COVID-19 has taken loved ones, jobs have vanished, and racial injustice continues unabated. But we have also witnessed the everyday heroism of ordinary people.…
BY DREW MCKEVITT Last week historian Lora Burnett at Collin College in Texas was the latest target of online harassment fomented by the website Campus Reform, only to be thrown under the bus by her administration in violation of its own academic freedom policies. Guest blogger Drew McKevitt, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana Tech…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued today (October 19) by the board of the University of California (UC) Berkeley Faculty Association. The University We Are For State support for public higher education in California has declined for decades: it constituted approximately one-third of the UC budget in 1990 and is about 10…
POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH The following is a call to action shared by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) Organizing Collective regarding the censorship by Zoom and Facebook of an online event at San Francisco State University. Read a previous blog post about it by John Wilson and others…
BY CHARLIE TYSON AND NAOMI ORESKES A couple of years ago, we decided to look at the question of liberal bias in the American academy. Are American colleges and universities disproportionately liberal and biased against conservatives? For most conservatives, and even some liberals, the answer is obvious. We wanted to examine whether the claim was…
BY HANK REICHMAN Historian Lora Burnett has been completing a book on the culture wars and the conflict over “western civilization.” She never thought she would have to add a chapter to her book about her own experiences as a professor. Until yesterday. Burnett, who goes by L.D. Burnett on Twitter where she has over…
BY KIMBERLY HARDING Spring 2020 was the unanticipated semester. Few thought in January 2020 that we would be teaching remotely by the end of March. Even then, hope existed that Fall 2020 would emerge as a more “normal” semester. This hope has since been put to rest for most institutions of higher learning. During this…