POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) was published on September 27. We all recognize that this is an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone in higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased costs, yet state support is being cut back and enrollments…
BY HANK REICHMAN If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now. Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes. And, yes, we’re…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this week John Wilson posted on this blog a piece about how “an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it.” If you have not read John’s post, please do so now; this is an incredibly important issue. As John…
BY HANK REICHMAN The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has apparently restored its diversity, equity and inclusion program after lab Director Mike Witherell told employees that the program would be suspended on orders from the White House, which called such initiatives “un-American propaganda training sessions.” In a second memo, issued over the weekend, Witherell said a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Stephen F. Cohen, one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history and politics and emeritus professor at Princeton and New York Universities, died of lung cancer on Friday at the age of 81. The author of ten books and numerous scholarly articles, Cohen was also a prominent public intellectual…
BY HANK REICHMAN Earlier this month the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege or employ critical race theory, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” In response, AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement that deemed the move “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter was published today in The Guardian. Dear Joe Biden, We write to you as the first generation made worse-off because of higher education. Student debt is a national crisis that destroys lives, drags down the economy and fuels the racial wealth gap. No one should be forced…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday AAUP President Irene Mulvey issued a statement condemning President Trump’s attack on critical race theory as “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.” This was not, however, Trump’s only such attempt. Less than 48 hours after tweeting that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Two webinars in which I had the pleasure and privilege of participating are now available to view as video recordings on the web. Here is the first, originally scheduled as a live presentation at the annual conference of the National Center for for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and…
BY HANK REICHMAN Hans A. Linde, a leading legal scholar who served on the Oregon Supreme Court from 1976 to 1990 and whose writings energized efforts to turn to state constitutions and courts in defense of civil liberties, died on Monday at the age of 96. He was, in the words of Lawrence Tribe, “one…