BY SUSAN HEGEMAN We’ve had a tumultuous fall in Florida. It began in August, shortly after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, when Richard Spencer, one of the speakers in Charlottesville, applied for a speaking venue at the University of Florida. UF initially denied his request, citing safety concerns, especially after it…
BY SARANNA THORNTON On September 7, 2017 Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, harshly criticized the “failed system” of policies promulgated in Dear Colleague Letters issued in 2011 and 2014. DeVos rightly noted that some colleges and universities have indelibly harmed survivors when their reports of sexual assault were “swept under the rug”. The Secretary rightly…
BY JONATHAN MARKS Guest blogger Jonathan Marks teaches political philosophy at Ursinus College. John Villasenor, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute is only the latest commentator to worry aloud about our college young, who don’t understand or value freedom of expression. A survey he conducted contains familiar bad news. A majority of respondents holds…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN This week, the Defenders of Civil Rights called on the UNC Law School administration and faculty to make the Center for Civil Rights a clinical project of the law school, to ensure that the community lawyering performed with and for low-wealth communities of color will continue. On Friday, the UNC Board of Governors…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Activists have been fighting for years for decent working conditions and pay for adjuncts and graduate student instructors. The majority of these activists are adjuncts and graduate students themselves. They have formed collective bargaining units under the auspices of the AAUP and other unions, and they have created organizations such as the…
BY JAY SMITH My article in the current issue of Academe, “Academic Freedom, Meet Big-Time College Sports,” tells a story about academic censorship. It provides a blow-by-blow account of the process whereby deans in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill intervened in departmental course scheduling in order to prevent the teaching of…
BY LUIS I. PRÁDANOS Every time I mention the obvious in a classroom—that most industrial economic activities deplete energy and materials and, therefore, constant economic growth in the context of a limited biosphere is a biophysical impossibility—I am moved by some students’ honest reactions. Their response will be some variation of “That makes sense. Why did nobody tell us before that as the global economy grows, the living systems of…
BY NEAL H. HUTCHENS Today, Neal H. Hutchens, member of the AAUP Litigation Committee and professor of Higher Education at the University of Mississippi, published this column in Hechinger Report: Last week, the idea of a potential move by the U.S. Department of Justice received swift pushback from supporters of affirmative action in higher education,…
BY RUSSELL RICKFORD This article was originally published by Black Perspectives, and is reposted here with permission. Black Perspectives is a project of the African-American Intellectual History Society. Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the…
BY IRENE NGUN The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is conducting a study of the impacts of gender-related experiences on women in science, engineering, and medical fields, and they have contracted with RTI International to gather information for the study. RTI International plans to conduct one-hour, in-depth telephone interviews with approximately 40 women…