BY HANK REICHMAN On December 10, I had the pleasure of participating in a fantastic and timely program in the University of California (UC) National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement’s 2021 “Speech Spotlight Live” series. “Is Academic Freedom Under Siege?” featured Sigal Ben-Porath, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and author of…
BY HANK REICHMAN “The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Michael Hobbes, a journalist based in Berlin, has a substack site, “Confirm My Choices,” where he regularly posts commentary on a variety of topics. Today he posted a piece, “Lies, Damn Lies and ‘Self-Censorship’ Statistics,” that really hit the nail on the head about the much-ballyhooed “Campus Free Speech Crisis.” I’m…
BY HANK REICHMAN With freedom comes responsibility. That old maxim is frequently heard in controversies involving academic freedom. Too often it is taken simply to suggest that such freedom carries with it the responsibility to limit the degree to which freedom is exercised. Don’t rock the boat, we have been warned, if we don’t want…
BY HANK REICHMAN I should have expected that those politicians demanding the removal from schools of books on “critical race theory” and other titles dealing with race and gender that might cause “discomfort” would inevitably fall back on that old standby of the book banners — the claim that school libraries and classrooms have been…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday’s launch of a new “university,” the so-called University of Austin (or UATX; their own acronym, which looks more like a listing on the stock exchange), garnered widespread ridicule on academic social media. University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis no doubt spoke for many when he tweeted, “Honestly, making fun of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On November 1, Brian Soucek, Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis, spoke as part of the UC Davis Forums on the Public University and the Social Good on “Academic Freedom: Dangers and Distractions.” Professor Soucek is the outgoing chair of the University of California’s…
BY HANK REICHMAN In March, more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. Yesterday they walked out again, this time indefinitely. The Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers has bargained with the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Recently I had the pleasure of discussing academic freedom with Keith Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance, for that organization’s podcast. His interview with me is now available at the link below. My thanks to Keith and to the AFA for…
BY HANK REICHMAN The state of Florida has gotten something of a reputation for zaniness. The “Florida Man” meme has been the source of both laughter and horror, as tales of outlandish behavior in the news repeatedly go viral. To read some of the most outrageous (and entertaining), go here. But these days “Florida Man”…